Sean Street - Sounds Poetics

PALGRAVE STUDIES
IN SOUND
Series Editor: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
SOUND
POETICS
Interaction and
Personal Identity
Seán Street
Palgrave Studies in Sound
Series editor
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Palgrave Studies in Sound is an interdisciplinary series devoted to
the topic of sound with each volume framing and focusing on sound
as it is conceptualized in a specific context or field. In its broad reach,
Studies in Sound aims to illuminate not only the diversity and complex-
ity of our understanding and experience of sound but also the myriad
ways in which sound is conceptualized and utilized in diverse domains.
The series is edited by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, The Obel Professor of
Music at Aalborg University, and is curated by members of the univer-
sity’s Music and Sound Knowledge Group.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15081
Seán Street
Sound Poetics
Interaction and Personal Identity
Seán Street
Bournemouth Media School
Bournemouth University
Poole, UK
Palgrave Studies in Sound

ISBN 978-3-319-58675-5 ISBN 978-3-319-58676-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58676-2
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I celebrate myself, and sing myself…
Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself ’
For Jo
Preface: Poetic Making
This is a book with the idea of poetry at its heart, by one who writes
poetry, who makes radio and who believes in an intimate connection
between the two disciplines. In it, the author will seek to explore the
relationship between sound, interaction and identity, using the con-
cept of the poetic as both metaphor and actual expression of the human
condition. It is a short book, as books by poets sometimes are, and it
is part of the author’s ongoing research into the philosophy of sound,
examining sonic signals as something heard both internally and exter-
nally, through imagination, memory and direct response. In doing so,
it seeks to explore how the mind ‘makes’ sound through experience, as
it interprets codes on the written page, and creates an internal leitmo-
tif that then interacts with new sounds made through an aural partner-
ship with the external world, chosen and involuntary exposure to music
and messages, both friendly and antagonistic to the identity of the self. It
will create an argument for sound as an underlying force that links us to
the world we inhabit, an essential part of being in the same primal sense
as the calls of birds and other inhabitants of a shared earth. Before pro-
ceeding, however, it is necessary for me to define this a little further and
to provide a personal context for the motive behind this writing. What
identity? Interaction with whom? Above all, why ‘poetics’?
In 1958, four years before his death, Gaston Bachelard, professor of
philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, published a remarkable book, called
La poétique de l’espace. The book was notable for many things, not least
the way it took an everyday environment, the intimate locations in which
ix
x Preface: Poetic Making
we each of us live our lives, and showed them to be places with signifi-
cances we had not previously dreamed of. Published in English in 1964
as The Poetics of Space, the book begins with an introduction in which
Bachelard confesses to a degree of soul-searching as he enters upon his
exploration:
A philosopher who has involved his entire thinking from the fundamen-
tal themes of the philosophy of science, and followed the main line of the
active, growing rationalism of contemporary science as closley as he could,
must forget his learning and break with all his habits of philosophical
research, if he wants to study the problems posed by the poetic imagina-
tion. [Bachelard, xv]
Here, observed Bachelard, was a realm of thinking where the tradi-

tional academic values counted for little, where receptivity and intuition
took precedence because the idea of the poetic involves the understand-
ing of concepts that in many cases bypass the intellect, a flash of light, a
momentary impression in which ‘the poetic image is a sudden salience
on the surface of the psyche’ [ibid.]. His was to be a quest based not
on causality, but in ‘reverberation’ and ‘in this reverberation, the poetic
image will have a sonority of being’ [ibid., xvi]. Poetry as an idea to be
employed in this present writing belongs more to a state of mind than
printed words (although it is that too). Poetry was after all, sound before
it was print, spoken before it was written text. Beyond that, however,
‘the poetic’ owes itself to the Greek for making, for a creative act. We
create artistically to express ourselves and to communicate with others.
Thus, I would argue that poetics, be they of space or of sound, are
not concerned with a minority interest or elitist means of luxurious
expression, but a fundamental exploration of what it means to be human.
In his 1948 autobiography, the American poet, William Carlos Williams,
referred to the writing of his great, book-length poem Paterson, which is
set in and around the New Jersey town of the same name, as an attempt
‘to find an image large enough to embody the whole knowable world
about me’ because ‘a man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no
ideas but in things’. For Williams, place and sound became one with the
human life around which it existed; the city noise, the people with whom
which one interacted daily, and in particular, the Passaic River and falls
with which the place is so strongly identified for anyone who knows the
location. The roar of the giant waterfall is everywhere in the long poem,
Preface: Poetic Making xi
either in the foreground, or as a distant but ever-present background

soundscape, and ‘in the imagination this roar is a speech or a voice, a
speech in particular; it is the poem itself that is the answer’ [Williams,
390–392].
William Carlos Williams was, by profession, a medical doctor; he
worked as a general practitioner, serving hundreds of patients, visiting
their homes, helping them to health and sometimes seeing them die. His
two defining personal truths—the scientific and the poetic—were indi-
visible, and both operated within the interactive world of hometown
America. He practiced medicine, but, like Bachelard, he remained acces-
sible to ‘a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche’. This book will
cover many aspects of identity, but at its core will be the fervent encour-
agement to listen actively and critically; only by so doing will the poetics
of sound offer up their prizes, showing how we are, fundamentally sonic
beings, first and foremost.
I have worked as a radio practitioner for most of my life, and from
the start, I felt the kindred disciplines of sound and poetry work-
ing together in the most meaningful expressive acts within my experi-
ence. Sound and poetry are kin; they both provide images that the mind
is required to interpret, but they are not prescriptive, allowing each of
us our own personal sets of pictures. Both can be transcendent, taking
us to places beyond the physical limitations of our immediate environ-
ment, and both are at the root, sonic. In an early edition of the BBC’s
journal, Radio Times, an unnamed feature writer suggested that ‘it is
not a strange thing that men have made poems about broadcasting, for
the new magic…is of the very stuff of poetry’ [Radio Times, December
1927, quoted in Street, (1) 10]. The pioneers of radio, including the
BBC’s first managing director, later its first director-general, John Reith,
were practical, technically adept and pragmatic, yet they were also vision-
ary and imaginative. Reith himself, in his book, Broadcast Over Britain,
published in 1924, just two years after the foundation of the (then)
British Broadcasting Company, saw an almost mystical power in the new
medium:
When we attempt to deal with ether we are immediately involved in the

twilight shades of the borderland; darkness presses in on all sides, and the
intensity of the darkness increased by the illuminations which here and
there are shed, as the investigators, candle in hand and advancing step by
step, peer into the illimitable unknown. [Reith, 223]
xii Preface: Poetic Making
Little wonder that when, a year later, the BBC opened its first national
transmitter on Borough Hill, Daventry, at the very centre of England,
on a site that had once been a Viking burial ground, the opening cer-
emony should include a specially commissioned poem by Alfred Noyse.
The legend was that the Danes planted a tree at the centre of their cem-
eteries, the branches of which were believed to transmit the souls of the
dead to the afterlife. The metaphor was not lost on Noyse; ‘Daventry
calling…’ he wrote: a call sign as communication, invisible, yet potent.
In the following pages, we shall explore the idea that we all possess our
own individual set of audio responses and that we transmit and receive
signals to and from the world around us in a variety of ways, personal,
communal, cultural and political. Further, that the sound within us and
the sound around us, whether physically heard or imagined through the
suggestions of text, photograph, painting, sculpture or music, is a funda-
mental part of who we are. We are both transmitter and receiver, and in
the words of Noyse’s poem,
All are in one circle bound,
And all that ever was lost is found. [Noyse, in Street (1), 21]
Poole, UK Seán Street

Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to offer my thanks to friends and colleagues who have

encouraged this writing, and who through conversation, suggestion and
discussion have, directly or indirectly, helped with the shaping of its direc-
tion. First thanks go to Mark Grimshaw, of Aalborg University in Denmark,
for suggesting that I develop ideas that had been gestating for some time
into a new text, complementing some of the ideas previously explored
in earlier works, notable The Poetry of Radio and The Memory of Sound.
Andrew Lees, author of Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs
Experiment, was supportive at the moment every author knows, at the start
of writing, when things feel so fragile. Once under way, the process has
been aided by many to whom I am indebted more than perhaps they realise
for insights that helped to clarify things in my mind. Nick Buchanan, David
Butler, Tim Crook, Peter Everett, Ieuan Franklin, Julian May, Jon Preston,
Chris Watson and Justin Wiggins all helped with advice, ideas and encour-
agement, and Alec Badenoch of the University of Utrecht and Caroline
Mitchell of the University of Sunderland invited me to present some of
early thoughts in a keynote at the 2016 Transnational Radio Encounters
Conference in Utrecht. Conversations with Richard Swigg, particularly in
relation to the work of Charles Tomlinson and William Carlos Williams,
have been both a pleasure and hugely informative and inspirational. Finally,
my deepest thanks go as always to Jo for her love, patience and support, as
well as her unerring eye on the minutiae of the manuscript.
Liverpool, UK Seán Street

Spring 2017
xiii
Contents
1 Poetry and the Idea of Sound 1
2 Silent Sound: Imagination and Identification 17
3 Transmitters and Receivers: Shared and Selected Sound 37
4 Invasion of the Sound Aliens 57
5 Uncomfortably Numb: Alone in the Sound World 75
6 Searching for the Sound of Self 93
Bibliography
113
Index
119
xv
CHAPTER 1
Poetry and the Idea of Sound
Abstract  Sound exists because it is made and because it is heard. ‘The

poetics of identity’ as a term may be defined in philosophical terms as
the internal capacity for response to instinctive intellectual and cultural
stimuli within the senses. This chapter introduces the theme of the book,
which is that of exploring the idea of sound as a poetic concept, an imag-
inative as well as concrete construct that frames identity. The central
premise is that there is within each of us a response system that contains
a subliminal leitmotif, unheard on a conscious level, but which is capa-
ble of a sympathetic ‘echo’ when triggered by certain sounds, be they
physical or suggested ‘silently’. Language evolved as sound, and when
the written text replaced the spoken word as a primary source of trans-
mission, sound through devices such as rhyme, rhythm, onomatopoeia
and assonance continued to interact with the imagination.
Keywords  Sound inside us · Identity · Written v. spoken text
The Sound of Self
No one sense provides me with all the evidence I need to interpret the
world; I move through an immediate set of circumstances where sight,
smell, taste, touch and sound offer multidimensional clues from which
my brain creates a presence for itself, and to which it responds. It is
all linked together in a dance, and sometimes the dancers touch one
© The Author(s) 2017 1

S. Street, Sound Poetics, Palgrave Studies in Sound,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58676-2_1
2 S. STREET
another, at other times they go solo. Sometimes one of the dancers takes
over completely and the others simply observe, before resuming their
weaving and cross-hatchings of meaning. These dancers perform within
a room, which sometimes has visible walls, at other times, not. In the
past one hundred years or so, two of the dancers, sight and sound, have
been offered artificial rooms where the walls become flexible, indetermi-
nate and sometimes as seemingly limitless as the imagination. Electronic
airwaves provide possibilities that feed into the immediacy of my local-
ised environment, even in what I have come to call ‘dead air’ (a fallacy
because how can air ever be dead?). Broadcast silence allows ‘the pos-
sibility for a silence that is not dead, a silence re-presenting a presence
whose essence is actualised even when its sonorous potential is not’
(Dyson, in Kahn and Whitehead, 380). Of all sensual moments, it is that
kind of silence that is a starting point, a moment of infinite possibility,
analogous with the moment the lights go down and before the curtain
rises in a theatre, the hiss of a needle on shellac or wax cylinder, as the
phonograph turns, or the disc revolves, before the ghost in the machine
speaks. Only one sense, but a sense capable of activating all the others
through the power of the imagination. The phonograph of memory
crackles its audio sepia, and through the horn or the speaker, the voices
of the dead come back. A ‘living’ voice evoking a mortal being, once a
possessor of the same senses as I, speaking one-to-one with me across all
the dimensions in which I exist, including time.
At this moment, I am alone with a voice—my self—which is internally
providing me with thoughts, emotions and feelings. There is an inter-
dependence between what I do and think, built upon memory and the
fact of my presence in the current moment, an interdependence between
myself and the circumstances in which I find myself. As I have lived,
that interaction has increased; like a handshake that squeezes tighter, it
makes me more aware of it, or a song growing louder and louder, until
it threatens to drown all around it. I must keep my balance. Interaction
must start with my self, the first being with which I ever interacted.
To begin then with a memory. A specific memory. When my daugh-
ter was expecting her baby, she attended prenatal classes and adopted a
number of exercises, one of which was relaxation to music. One piece
became a favourite, a meditative piano solo, part of a CD of music
designed for the purpose. From about ten weeks into the pregnancy,
each evening, she would play this music, easing herself into sleep. Then
the baby was born. Some two weeks later, when the little girl was crying
1 POETRY AND THE IDEA OF SOUND 3
uncontrollably, my daughter sought to alleviate her distress. Having

done all the right things to no avail, in desperation she decided to play
the CD. When the piece from her night-time routine began, there was
a sudden change. The baby stopped crying. Her eyes grew wide, and
she listened. She listened with recognition, a memory awoken. It was a
sound from her past, from before birth.
Hearing is the first sense to awaken in us, and the last to leave us.
Throughout our lives, we are defined by sound: the sound around us and
the sound of ourselves. Our Self. We may close our eyes, but we cannot
close our ears. Sound exists not only because it is created, but because it
is heard. It affects us at a subliminal level, bypassing our emotional and
cultural filters, seeping under the Radar of prejudice and going to the
core of our being. Even if we encounter physical hearing problems in our
lives, there is never a time when absolute silence takes over our being. We
participate in sound in voluntary and involuntary ways. It is part of the
fabric of our world, and it is inherent in our being. Reading is an appar-
ently silent room, the words translate themselves to sound in our mind
and images sing in our aural imagination. Underlying all is the beat of our
bloodstream and the hum of our nervous system. Stepping into the street,
the stereo soundscape of the world rushes in on us, and immediately we
become a part of the improvised jazz of life’s sonic environment, adapting
our personal ‘song’ to our circumstances. As we do so, our memory bank
grows, identifying and storing new sounds, absorbing their meaning for
future reference, learning to live in and with the changing music of life. It
is a continuous process, going on around us and in spite of us, a process
in which we participate. We have no choice. And it begins in the womb.
This book explores how sound—as an imaginative as well as a con-
crete construct—frames and shapes our identity, and our relationship with
the world in which we live, through which we move and by which we are
formed. It argues that sound is itself a poetic concept; the root of our mod-
ern word, ‘poetry’ is Poïesis, etymologically derived from the ancient Greek
term meaning literally “to make”. In its beginning it was a verb, an action
that transforms and continues the world. Thus, this word reconciles thought
with matter and time and is a fundamental part of the connection between
a human being and existence. It is about making sound, but it is also about
listening. With Jean-Luc Nancy, I would ask, among other things:
What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to
capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message? What secret is
4 S. STREET
yielded – hence also made public – when we listen to a voice, an instru-

ment, or a sound just for itself ?…What does to be listening, to be all ears,
as one would say “to be in the world,” mean? What does it mean to exist
according to listening, for it and through it, what part of experience and
truth is put into play? (Nancy, 5)
Sound defines us. We cannot escape its influence and affect, just as we
cannot but be shaped by our background and formative environment.
We carry our own song with us, expanding it and extemporising as we
live, but based on a small but vital pattern of sound that sits at the core
of our being. We are transmitters and receivers, a system of call and
response powered by a leitmotif that, although unheard at a conscious
level, is capable of being triggered to either sympathetic or antipathetic
reactions by sounds heard physically or ‘silently’, that is to say through
the imaginative stimuli of a text or a thought. It begins and ends in and
with the self.
Time Travel
This book places poetry alongside sound and explores how one medium
informs the other; more, it seeks to identify aspects of both that unite
them as one. Sound is a poetic form, and poetry was sound before it was
print, which takes us to the voice, a fundamental part of our identity by
which we are perceived and judged throughout our lives. Sound, speech
and reading are linear. Unlike a photograph or a painting, these forms
move through time, and as they travel through our mind, they create
or recreate codes that the brain learns to recognise. A child begins with
sound—crying is a fundamental and unmistakeable form of communica-
tion, and it remains so throughout our life. Crying—and crying out—
demands a response. In his book, Dark Voices, Noah Pikes examines the
work of the theatre director Roy Hart, and his inspirational mentor, the
singing teacher, Alfred Wolfson. Wolfson, a German Jew, suffered deep
traumas in the trenches of World War l, and his experiences of hearing
the elemental cries of wounded soldiers affected him deeply, leading him
to explore the relationship between voice and self. Wolfson saw in a very
young baby’s cry something that later becomes inhibited by more com-
plex meanings, something of a sonic essence at the very core of exist-
ence. When a baby is hungry, it cries, or rather:
…it does not actually cry, it cries out and this represents a source of energy
which many a singer could envy…Children, on the whole, also use their
voices correctly, unless they are very inhibited…when they get older, they
lose much of their naturalness and with it inhibitions set in. The grown-up
has forgotten how to open his mouth in a natural way; by adjusting himself
to the world around him, he has forgotten how to scream… Behind this
vocal condition lies the loss which the grown- up suffers by not being able
to preserve his state of naturalness. (Pikes, 41)
William Wordsworth saw something deeply mystical in the birth of con-

sciousness:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come… 1
Wordsworth’s view as expressed in his great ode, ‘Intimations of

Immortality’, was this: we arrive in the world as a concentrated essence
that the utilitarian requirements of daily life begin almost at once to
dilute:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy…
Be that as it may, our first task on arrival—after the necessity of survival—

is to find meaning, to absorb and interpret the vocabulary—literally and
metaphorically—of life. Wordsworth’s growing boy—or girl—discov-
ers language initially through listening and imitation. Words are sounds
before the eye learns to decode them on the page. So from a very early
point in our existence, we are shaped by a set of increasingly com-
plex sound codes linked to meaning, constantly being added to by the
external environment through which we pass, working on our identity
through circumstance, and ever more, as we develop, through memory.
As Wolfson’s words imply, the personal sound of identity is something
other than dialogue; the general sound of life does not answer back,
6 S. STREET
but feeds the internal monologue of self, which in turn feeds into a per-
sonal identity by which we are recognised in our individual interactions
with others. One analogy would be jazz, a musical form built on a for-
mal melody, but which, through the subconscious artistic responses of
its interpreters, has the capacity to move into new personalised realms
of meaning. As we carry our own song through life, we are constantly
touching other tunes, and frequently we are required to improvise the
expression of our self in relation to what surrounds us, interacting as a
human being like a musician. We are co-performers in a sound work at
the heart and centre of which is always ourselves. It is salutary to realise
what a tiny part of the overall work we actually contribute to; the ears
have a limited horizon, as do the eyes, but other sound existences are
happening over and over, beyond that horizon. Technology connects
us to a filtered interpretation of that broader sphere, but we are left to
ourselves to negotiate our way through the immediacy of our particu-
lar ‘scene’, making sense of the meanings—or lack of meanings—we
encounter through experience presented to us by sound linked along a
fine silver thread of consciousness to our other senses.
The self that moves through the world sees and hears itself—how
could it not?—within the context of time past and time present, and the
memory of the former informs the reality of the latter. The young men
who were radio’s early pioneers, John Reith, Arthur Burrows and the
rest of the team who created the BBC, grew out of a nineteenth-century
Victorian childhood. The poet Thomas Hardy, who died in 1927, and
who therefore lived into the era of radio, experiments in television, air-
craft and the internal combustion engine, was born in 1844 and recalled
that his grandmother in her turn remembered the day she heard of
the death of Marie Antoinette. In a speech delivered in May 1924, the
English politician Stanley Baldwin recalled:
The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the coun-
try smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe
against whetstone…These things strike down into the very depths of our
nature, and touch chords that go back to the beginning of time and the
human race, but they are chords that in every year of our life sound a
deeper note in our innermost being. (Baldwin, 7)
Interestingly the text of the speech was published as part of a book enti-
tled On England, and Other Addresses, in 1926, the very year of the
General Strike. It may feel even more anachronistic today than when it
was written, but nevertheless it is true that a sound from the past can
place us imaginatively in another time, while we physically remain in the
present. We are only two or three handshakes away from what would
otherwise seem to be very distant lives and experiences, and sound can
act as the bridge. I have written about the relationship between mem-
ory and sound elsewhere,2 and it impossible to escape some discussion of
memory when considering the relationship between sound and personal
identity. William Hazlitt, writing in his last essay, shortly before he died
in 1830, found himself transported to the beginnings of his career by the
sound of bells used by service industries in the streets of London, in par-
ticular The Letter-Bell which signalled the coming of the post:
It strikes upon the ear, it vibrates to the brain, it wakes me from the dream
of time, it flings me back upon my first entrance into life, the period of my
first coming up to town, when all around was strange, uncertain, adverse
– a hubbub of confused noises, a chaos of shifting objects – and when this
sound alone, startling me with the recollection of a letter I had to send
to friends I had lately left, brought me as it were to myself, made me feel
that I had links still connecting me to the universe, and gave me hope and
patience to persevere. (Hazlitt, 149–150)
While we may have these written—if not actually sonic—witnesses to the

past, its real sound, like the sound of the future, lies in our imagination.
We may guess what kind of voice the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex pos-
sessed and use the idea of it in depictions, but we dramatise these things
rather than reproduce them. In a similar way, in fantasy and science fic-
tion we create sound that satisfies the imagination, because there can be
no argument—only conjecture—as to what things will actually sound
like. Stanley Kubrick, in 2001, A Space Odyssey referenced the past in his
soundtrack to comment on the future; in the famous sequence where
spaceships appear to dance around the earth, he uses, not sound effects,
but music in the form of Johann Strauss ll’s Blue Danube waltz. In so
doing, not only does he enchant us by the grace of sound and image
linked, Kubrick subtly reminds us that the sophistication of these gleam-
ing machines—like the opulence of the Hapsburg empire—is built on
military and political power. By placing the image of the waltz in our
minds, Kubrick also subliminally creates a sexual motif; the waltz was
in its time, a risqué dance, and sex and power so often go together.
8 S. STREET
William Whittington points to the fact that while offering visual images
of an imaginary future, Kubrick uses points of reference that are of our
past and present, and viscerally human: ‘The visual spectacle set to the
waltz implies a dance of grace and progression and ultimately a court-
ship towards procreation’ (Whittington, 51). The soundtrack of film is
a significant example of an area in which sound and imagination may be
linked to create meaning, using the mind as an interpreter. In one of the
opening scenes of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the sound
designer Walter Murch plays on this collaborative instinct in the audi-
ence’s brain, by stretching a thread of meaning between what we are see-
ing and what we are hearing. The visual image may be of a drunk man
in a seedy Saigon hotel room, but the sound is of the Vietnamese jun-
gle; the juxtaposition is profound. The soldier cannot escape his destiny
and the memory of what has touched him in the past. Murch is physi-
cally creating a sound world that is a replication of what goes on in our
own minds all the time as we negotiate social situations around us. We
are at once always interacting and interpreting, ‘reading’ life through our
own particular lens, and internally commenting on what we see and hear
through a soundtrack built on experience, memory and imagination.
Tribal Voices
We belong to the tribe of our time as well as of our place. Seeing and
hearing the world from the perspective of where we are at any one given
moment, we also cannot but help being influenced by the urban or rural
environment to which we culturally belong, and the country we inhabit.
Dialect, accent and language are the sounds the child passed on to him-
self or herself as he or she grew, and those sounds belong to the place
as well as to ourselves. We may listen to the world on our computer,
through our television or radio, or through recorded media, but we con-
duct that listening in a specific place, and that can lead to a curious dis-
connect in the audio-visual experience.
The earliest BBC broadcasts came from localised centres; this was
born out of technical necessity because the technology did not allow at
the time for a national service, but the social benefits of radio stations
at the heart of the communities to which they broadcast were seen as
important enough for regional broadcasting to be a part of national pol-
icy, once the giant transmitter of Daventry enabled one voice to speak to
one nation in 1925. During the 1930s, major centres of regional identity
were established, in some part mirroring the social milieu of their bases,
and through network broadcasting, transmitting elements of that cul-
ture to the rest of the country. Notable in this respect was the BBC
Features Department established in Manchester in the early 1930s under
E.A. Harding, which served as a radical conduit for subjects, ideas and
voices from social classes that had previous not found a significant place
on BBC programmes. Later, the coming of portable recording enabled
working-class voices to be heard direct from their centres of employ-
ment. On a larger scale, international broadcasting via short wave ena-
bled nation to listen to nation, and for the first time, even before the
coming social revolution in global travel, voices from other tribes were
heard by domestic audiences.
Technologies—media—interact with the mind in its sound-making
process in the same way as the mind interprets and creates internal
responses in the imagination and through memory to the scanning of
codes and information gleaned from art, the printed word and the physi-
cal environment in which we find ourselves. The difference is that we
choose our listening, our viewing and—increasingly—the time we devote
to that listening and viewing. We do this just as we choose our clothes
and the papers and magazines we read, as an extension of our own per-
sonalities, but we absorb other programmed information along the way
at the same time, including ideas of tribal, political cultural and national
identity that contextualise us as part of a community, as part of our own
interactive ‘club’.
Neither is our listening purely cochlear; there is the vibration of the
world all around us, a force utilised by the whole of the human body
to receive signals of a sense of place and situation. Artists such as Laurie
Anderson have used this idea, transmitting sound through the limbs to
the mind, directly. I recall a demonstration in London’s Purcell Room in
which the sound recordist Chris Watson played the audience a recording
of a Blue Whale—the largest creature that has ever lived on earth. The
effect was extraordinary; the sound was so low as to be barely audible to
the ear, and yet the whole room seemed to shake and vibrated deeply in
the chests of the listeners. We may close our eyes, we may even block our
ears, but our body continues as an active receiver of sound. Music played
at high volume, the utilisation of base frequencies, capitalise on this
sense inside us; we speak of an idea like a sound, a thing that resonates
within. At the same time, when we hear an actual sound blindly, the
‘grain’ of it, to use Barthes’s word, communicates itself independently
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of language. A scream of pain needs no words of explanation to express

itself, and, as voice coaches point out to would-be broadcasters, ‘you can
hear a smile’ on radio.
Choice and no Choice

Anthems—in popular music and as signposts to nationalism, the sonic
equivalent of flags—offer themselves through similar double resonances
as membership cards for a club. If you are able to sing along, it shows
others that you belong, and technologies propagate this method of
manipulation in ways that previous generations of rulers and dictators
would sorely envy.
A crowd at a sporting event or a demonstration, made up of indi-
viduals, becomes a living creature in its own right, bound together by
a united purpose, the symptom of which is almost always sound. At the
same time, the targeting of the individual through personalised mobile
technologies and social media means that we can be spoken to directly,
within the context of our personal life, tastes and opinions, enhancing
the view of our environment through the filter of our own chosen iden-
tity world, which in turn helps to confirm the image we have of ourselves
in terms of purpose and being. Underlying this self is the person that has
been and continues to be shaped in partnership—voluntary and some-
times involuntary—through our own personality and the environment it
inhabits, exemplified, and often personified by the sound—broadcast and
narrowcast—to which it is exposed and through which it moves. Radio
and TV stations feed this sense of self in the sound and style of their
presentation by way of idents, jingles and continuity, as much as in their
specific speech or music content. Broadcast scheduling and programming
remain as crucial parts of this feeding process.
Choice is a crucial component of the self, and a large component
of the personal sound world is selection. Some call it ‘the cocktail
party effect’, that ability the brain possesses to ‘tune in’ to interesting
signals within a noisy environment and filter out extraneous and irrel-
evant sonic detritus. The world around us is made up of messages and
abstract sounds beyond our control, audio events and environments
that may or may not be important to us. These can come from liter-
ally any direction and source, and they happen like weather: that is to
say, they just happen. Industrial landscapes, street noise, warfare, human
suffering and the penetration of sound propaganda for selling, politics,
ideologies and other forms of indoctrination bombard us constantly. We

may reject them consciously, but they implant themselves in our subcon-
scious, refusing to allow our minds to ‘unhear’ them. The memory of
a short-wave call sign from a cold war radio station, or externally origi-
nated sound such as piped music and in-store ambience and announce-
ments create a subliminal ‘soup’ through which we wade every day, while
selecting or rejecting specific signals as required, deciding in the short
term whether or not each signal requires action, and seeking to preserve
a personal identity within this homogenised created/manufactured world
of retail, travel and utility.
This selection process has the capacity for changing abstract noise into
useable sound, a process through which we personalise and customise
the audio world to fit into our individual life. For a composer such as
John Cage, for example, the act of acceptance or rejection may turn raw
materials into art:
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it

disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a
truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to
capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as
musical instruments. (Cage, 3)
Thus, these ‘sound aliens’ may be ignored, absorbed, interacted with or

used according to choice. Noises become meaningful when, as Douglas
Kahn writes, they ‘are too significant to be noises’ (Kahn, 21). To focus
on a generalised loud, continuous abstract noise can be highly disorien-
tating. It is interesting to note that the Latin root of the word ‘noise’
is nausea. David Novak has pointed to the fact as capturing this sense
of disorientation: ‘Noise is a context of sensory experience, but also a
moving subject of circulation, of sound and listening, that emerges in the
process of navigating the world and its differences’ (Novak & Sakakeeny,
126). In a positive way, the invasion of sound may open doors to past
existence through memory. The subtle selective ‘tuner’ that is the sub-
conscious may extract a particular sound—even something minute and
apparently insignificant—as a key to a moment in our past. Proustian
involuntary memory may trigger recalled aspects of our identity, just
as serendipity and accidental sonic moments surprise us as we find our-
selves—in spite of ourselves—interacting with them. The randomness
of the world is made up of an infinite number of individual activities,
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purposes, motivations and sound sources; these translate into a sound-

scape playing simultaneously, whose natural limits are governed by dis-
tance and perspective. Technology artificially distorts, enhances or
amplifies these, and broadcasts (or narrowcasts) them to our personal
world should we choose to allow it. Mostly however, as we have seen, we
step out of our door each day and are at once audience and participant in
an ongoing orchestra continually playing a form of musique concrete that
forms the soundtrack to our identity. In normal circumstances, we have
little option but to participate, but active listening is a conscious deci-
sion, a major factor in the determination of the self.
Soundless in the Sonic World

What though, when the sound stops? That is to say, when we know
longer interact with the world, either through physical disability or spir-
itual muteness/deafness that for whatever reason, leaves us alone in
the sonic world that surrounds us? Like many species, we are creatures
of interaction; the phrase ‘call and response’ gives us three words as a
key leitmotif in this journey. The lifelong process of learning through
the auditory cues provided by our personal environment is crucial to
how our brain is customised to absorb language and a sense of Place.
Deafness, or the barrier of such ailments as tinnitus, can force the brain
to rewire itself to accommodate change or inadequacy of its receiver
mechanisms. As we retune a radio to gain the maximum strength of
signal, so we ‘adjust our set’ to take in as best it can, the messages the
world is sending us. Yet impairment means the brain spends longer pro-
cessing what it is trying to absorb. We may grow impatient if a hard of
hearing friend appears to be slow to take in something we say to them.
In fact, it is not obtuseness, but a form of translation that delays the
process. Again, the analogy of a weak signal on a radio is appropriate;
it takes more energy just to receive the signal, even before the task of
interpretation begins. Non-cochlear listening may confuse or confirm
our place, physically and culturally; how often have we said something
to a companion, clearly within earshot, only to be met by the response:
‘Sorry, what did you say? I wasn’t listening’. Conscious, specific listening
is indeed selective, and while we may hear the words, another sound—
a phrase, a song or a vibration—has exercised a greater power over our
imagination. It occurs when we are deep in a book, or lost in a physi-
cal vibration, the source of which may be a mystery, something we are
mentally seeking a reason for, yet which absorbs our consciousness. It

does not mean, however, that every signal, from a surround-sound world
of 360°, has not been absorbed to some degree. As Kim-Cohen reminds
us, ‘the “non” in non-cochlear is not a negation, not an erasure…It is
most definietly not silence. The non-cochlear and the cochlear pass into
one another indefinitely’ (Kim-Cohen, p. Xxii).
A Place in Time
Reverberations and echoes govern us, and we listen for other voices
and sounds to help place us in the world. Thus, for a number of rea-
sons, we may become disorientated when we are left with only our
internal sound world, without the surrounding soundtrack of an exter-
nal context. Silence, as we shall see, can be a positive thing, a unique
part of the sound spectrum, but negative stillness is something else: it
acts independently of the natural sound world and may be neurological
rather than—or as well as—physical. The loneliest place on earth—be it
literally or metaphorically—is an anechoic chamber; we may indeed enter
such a place, but equally it may lie within us. Both Thomas Hardy and
Walter de la Mare wrote poems that explore the terror of sonic nothing-
ness. Hardy’s ‘Silences’ moves, in its five verses, through various forms of
audio emptiness, ending inside the mind itself, as it contemplates memo-
ries in an old house, a place where sounds remembered have given way
to moral and spiritual stillness:
…the rapt silence of an empty house

Where oneself was born,
Dwelt, held carouse
With friends, is of all silences most forlorn!
[‘Silences’]
Likewise, in ‘The Listeners’, Walter de la Mare has his protagonist stand-

ing outside a silent house, calling in vain ‘Is there anybody there?’ This
great poem, justly famous and much anthologised, has a growing terror
at its heart. Suffice to say that one explanation of the soundless house
in de la Mare’s story is that it represents the unanswered question that
lies at the heart of all human existence. Those words—‘Is there anybody
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there?’—were echoed in a different context in Orson Welles’s famous

radio CBS adaptation of the H.G. Wells story, The War of the Worlds.
A radio DX-er strives, as we shall see later, to make contact with some-
one—anyone—to know avail. The Martians, it seems, have wiped out all
life around him. Coming as it did in 1938, on the brink of global catas-
trophe, Welles’s reinventing of the Victorian parable was one episode in
a number of historical instances where fictionalised encounters with alien
forces acted as metaphors for comments on the human condition, nota-
bly in terms of antagonistic regimes and culturally and/or politically for-
eign concepts that leave the individual alone and devoid of the capacity
for interaction with like minds. The reality of a lost creature calling in
vain for a member of its own species tells us that isolation is heightened
by the lack of an answer, whatever and whoever we may be.
The Invention of Self
The poetics of sound cannot exist without the imagination, and the
imagination has the capacity to create sound out of silence, through sig-
nals from the eye, the nose, the mouth and the skin. I am an animal,
and non-cochlear listening is part of my survival in the world, as well as
my joy in it. Around me, the world vibrates, and my body absorbs the
vibrations, and this world has invented the means by which I can indulge
myself in all this, and invent myself. ‘The force of the tools that a soci-
ety provides itself and that of its imagination are never dissociable’ wrote
the contemporary art historian, Marc le Bot (Le Bot, 76). The hiss of
the needle on the phonograph cylinder was by no means the start; in
my beginning, at the commencement of all things, even before the song
began, there was a white noise in my mind, through which distant mur-
murs came, and which came bursting into my consciousness as I in turn
burst into its world at the moment of my birth. The made machines with
which I surround myself are simply aids to facilitate my absorption and
dissemination of signals, from which I build a constantly evolving and
developing sense of presence.
That sound—like life—dissolves is a fact and a poem in itself. When
recording was invented, it both made a sound and was an object from
which the sound came. Thus, it was miraculous and man-made at the
same time, a link with the dead through memory, and with the unborn,
through witness, a visible and aural moment in time preserved. The
device arrived at a crucial moment in history too, as philosophers and
the conclusions drawn from a century of mass and self-destruction were

about to show that God is dead. At least now, the voice lives on, and
while a moving picture may show me immortality, it is only an observed
image, of which I am not part. With this voice, I am speaking or being
spoken to, only me, at this moment in time, before it then it passes
again, and the room grows silent.
These are some of the themes this book seeks to explore; the personal
sound of our being and its interaction with the free-form orchestra that
plays around us, how one relates to the other, define to a large extent
the journey we embark on at birth. We continually listen for voices,
both within our own silent world, and through the incoming transmis-
sions from external sources that place us in time. These voices may either
develop our concept of who we are, or reinforce our pre-conceptions.
Silence is the bed upon which this story is based. We have briefly dis-
cussed negative silence, and we shall return to it later. We must also
acknowledge the more positive nature of this most potent of all sounds.
It is most easily examined through drawing a comparison with the
extremes of colour—black and white. The inky blackness of night may
be terrifying, and enhance a feeling of loneliness, the unknown, the
threat of things unseen. Conversely, it may be the backdrop for a sky full
of light, of infinite worlds that are invisible in the light of day. It may
be that moment with which I began, that instant of expectation as the
theatre darkens, before the curtain rises on a magic world. So it may be
with sound, and its apparent absence; is it the moment before the tiger
leaps on us from the jungle, or the infinite silence of possibility, out of
which new imaginative worlds flower? The first word in Dylan Thomas’s
script for his great play for voices, Under Milk Wood is ‘Silence’. It is a
cherished accident of English vocabulary that the word ‘Silent’ is an ana-
gram of the word ‘Listen’. At the other extreme of the spectrum is the
coming together of all colours into white. Analogous with this is white
noise, a meaningless static of unintelligible noise, or the possibility for
clear thought, the white sheet of paper that awaits the word or the image
carrying a new vision. In his preface to an edition of Gilbert White’s
Natural History of Selborne, Richard Jefferies wrote: ‘It is in…quietness
that the invisible becomes visible’ (Jefferies in White, xi).
Sound—like life itself—exists in time; we catch it as it passes us, and
as we do so, it is already fading, moving on and away from us, becom-
ing memory. That in itself is the very stuff of poetry, heard in the mind,
transmitted from the page or shared from the mind of another through a
16 S. STREET
song or a radio programme or a conversation. Technology has provided

us with the means to broadcast ourselves at the expense of listening to
others in a ‘me’ generation that shouts and sings its personal aspiration
into a noisy void. Yet the need to be a voice, and to absorb the spirit
of other voices, remains undiminished deep within us. Thus, we must
begin, not with sound, but with silence, not with sending audio signals,
but with listening. The journey starts, as it will end, within us.
Notes
1. ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’
2. The Memory of Sound, (Routledge 2014).
CHAPTER 2
Silent Sound: Imagination

and Identification
Abstract  Silent sound surrounds us in our daily life, a bubble of inter-

nalised audio that plays continuously, like a musical theme running
through a jazz improvisation. An idea has its own sound, and the written
word may evoke a sound, or suggest to us the nature of our relationship
within the greater sound world that surrounds us. Listening is linked to
seeing, and it is a quality that informs both our sense of who we are, and
how we form our responses to the world around us. This chapter asks the
reader to actively listen to themselves even as they absorb the words on
the page. From this spreads the immediate sound world around them,
the place that is their context for being in a precise moment. This act in
itself creates a strong metaphor for the theme of the book—the separa-
tion and melding of sound environments that together shape identity.
Keywords  Internal sound · Poetic images · Words as sound

Pictures in words · Active listening
Haunted Words
In his book, Air and Dreams, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard
invokes the idea of two forms of silence, those that are mitigated by
breathing, which he suggests to be a form of speech, and those that are
held behind the lips, which he calls ‘closed silence’. He suggests that
‘the moment…aerial imagination is awakened, the reign of closed silence

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58676-2_2
18 S. STREET
is ended. Then there begins a silence that breathes. Then there begins
the reign of “open silence….”’ (Bachelard, 242). In this, he is addressing
himself ‘to the experience of all those who can feel vocal pleasure without
having to speak, to all those who are stimulated by silent reading and
who lay on the threshold of their morning the verbal dawn of a beautiful
poem’ (ibid., 244).
Poetry—like sound—creates pictures in the mind, visual images
that reverberate in the memory, often returning, whether prompted or
unprompted, when we least expect it. We may be on the commuter run,
peering at the urban landscape on a wet Monday morning, when some
recalled line in a poem takes us somewhere else entirely. I remember
just such an occasion during the 1960s as a student, travelling down the
Hagley Road from my college in Birmingham into the city on the num-
ber 9 bus, reading Walter Scott’s ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’, and discov-
ering these lines about the ruins of Melrose Abbey:
If though wouldst view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey.
When the broken arches are black in night,
And each shafted oriel glimmers white;
When the cold light’s uncertain shower
Streams on the ruin’d central tower;
When buttress and buttress, alternately,
Seem framed of ebon and ivory;
When silver edges the imagery,
And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die;
When distant Tweed is heard to rave,
And the owlet to hoot o’er the dead man’s grave,

2 SILENT SOUND: IMAGINATION AND IDENTIFICATION 19
Then go – but go alone the while –
Then view St David’s ruin’d pile;
And, home returning, soothly swear,
Was never scene so sad and fair!1
I include that passage in full, because it is all about imagery: visual

images of course—sights that stirred the gothic imagination of a fresher
on his way to college on a murky morning in 1965—but also sound,
some of which is suggested literally in the text, but also whispers and
murmurs that the reader can create for themselves. For poetry, again
like sound, is a partnership between the maker and the reader/listener;
that is why we remember the most powerful examples of both; we have,
in fact, helped to create it through the interplay of words/sounds and
the imagination. The poet Tom Paulin said that ‘one shouldn’t sim-
ply be visualising what one reads, one should be hearing it’ (Paulin in
Sider, Freeman and Sider, 46). Scott tells us we can hear an owl, and
the faint tumult of the distant River Tweed, and by so doing he creates
such a wonderful sense of aural perspective, the presence of the stream
and the owl startling us close by, that we hear it, just as he suggests that
we should. By giving us these two sound images, and these only, he also
plays us the silence of the rest of the scene; there is no other sound, it is
still, and as the poet instructs us, we are alone. We may leave it at that—
it is enough, surely?—or we may add our own subtle audio to the mix
(we are makers in this process too, don’t forget). Is there a low wind
moaning through the Aeolian harp of the ‘gothic arches’? Are their rooks
calling through the early night? I have not been to Melrose Abbey, so
I have no idea if rooks inhabit the place, but this is my picture, this is
between me and the poet, and if my imagination wants dark mysterious
birds, it shall have them. The words that began on the bus in a subur-
ban traffic jam are now working inside my mind, developing, intensify-
ing and becoming a part of who I am. The poem that started outside
of me in a book, an object in my hands, has now wormed through my
consciousness and internalised itself forever, awaiting only the prompted
or unprompted recall of circumstance, voluntary or involuntary memory.
Now, as you read this text, you inherit them, and have the capability,
should you choose to exercise it, of conducting the same sound transfer-
ence exercise as you listen to the words on the page within your mind.
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In May 1819, John Keats wrote a poem which is as full of sound as any
that came from his pen. Yet the key feature of this poem, the ‘Ode on a
Grecian Urn’, is the juxtaposition of silence and clamorous sound. This is
a meditation on the embossed images of a Greek vase of unspecified ori-
gin. Prior to writing the poem, accounts tell us that he had been impressed
by a number of works in the British Museum and elsewhere, among them
the Townley Vase, the Borghese Vase, the Holland House Vase, the Elgin
Marbles and the Sosibios Vase, of which he made a drawing.2 The Ode was
published anonymously in the journal, Annals of the Fine Arts in January
1820, just a month before the onset of the poet’s last illness. It begins:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time…
When the work was first published, a comma was inserted after the word
‘still’. In subsequent publications, this was removed. It is highly signifi-
cant to the meaning of the poem, changing ‘still’ from an adjective to
an adverb; the first meaning implies lack of movement, or more, com-
plete absence of physical sound. The absence of the comma implies that,
as Andrew Motion has written, ‘the urn is only touched by damage or
interpretation for the time being. Its days are numbered’ (Motion, 392).
Let us consider the line with the comma replaced:
Thou still, unravish’d bride of quietness…
The virginal quality of the vase remains intact, while its silence touches
us with awe in the context of the noisy world in which we observe the
object. Keats, though, hears another world of sound as he observes the
urn, one of pagan carousing and orgy:
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth,
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Keats’s mind is running riot as he brushes his imaginative fingers over

the braille of the embossed forms depicted on the vase, resulting in one
of the noisiest poems he ever wrote. Yet it is all in the fancy, conjured by
the brain from dumb witness. This, for the poet, makes the sounds all
the clearer, all the more eloquent:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone…
This is the silent sound we create when we read, when we view a work
of art, or indeed when we mentally interact with the world in general
around us. The soundtrack is our own, a response to stimuli either spon-
taneously experienced or imposed subjectively by the chosen act of con-
centrated attention on words or images. In other words, we have the
capacity to make sounds within our imagination, as well as to interpret
sounds heard externally.
Those sounds from outside us flood in without our control, envel-
oping internal silence and placing us in the world. A simple experiment
demonstrates this: open your door or window for the first time in the
morning with your eyes closed. The ambience of our immediate environ-
ment rushes into the head, and at once we know where we are, have a
sense of the weather around us and begin to identify required informa-
tion that complements our other senses. It is as though we are a kind
of torus, and inside us, in the ‘space within the whole’ there is a silence
waiting to be filled, like a reservoir that the sound world ‘tops up’ as we
engage with the sonic circumstances of where we are. In the case of the
imaginative sound that is self-created (or rather created through interac-
tion between the mind and an otherwise silent source—as with Keats’s
vase), we approach a deeply personalised area of our being, in which each
of us may ‘hear’ something different, or at least a variant of the same
sound, ‘tuned’ by our own imagination. Keats is reading the vase, as he
might read a book. As Dylan Thomas in Under Milk Wood makes the
connection between hearing and seeing, likewise we may reverse that to
identify the link between seeing and hearing. Images, objects and words
are a form of notation that may or may not produce a sonic response in
the mind; at least they may have the capacity to do so.
When we read an imagist text, be it prose or poetry, the imagination
is stirred to create sound in partnership with the words, in other words
22 S. STREET
a soundtrack. It is as though that imaginative pool, apparently dormant,

awaits signals sent from the eyes (in this instance) to set its musical
instrument in motion. Thomas Hardy’s most evocative sound world was
that which he found around him in his native Dorset, notably in the vast
area of woodland, farmland and bracken he named ‘Egdon Heath’. The
composer Gustav Holst wrote a tone poem for orchestra by that very
name, a slow mysterious work that barely ever rises above a murmur, in
an attempt at mirroring Hardy’s moody landscape. In fact, Hardy him-
self used landscape far more subtly by creating an interaction between
the individual in the landscape, and the person reading his text. Time
and again, his characters find themselves as part of the natural world that
surrounds them, and its sound becomes their sound, both as metaphor
and as reality. In his novel, The Return of the Native, the exotically beau-
tiful outsider, Eustacia Vye, living in a remote part of the Heath with her
grandfather, isolated physically, keeps herself apart from the heath dwell-
ers by her walks alone and her frequent nightly excursions to the summit
of an ancient tumulus known as Rainbarrow. Separate from human dis-
course she may be, but on these excursions she seems to begin to speak
with the voice of the landscape:
“The spirit moved them.” A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon the
attention; and an emotional listener’s fetichistic mood might have ended in
one of more advanced quality. It was not, after all, that the left-hand expanse
of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those of the slope in front. It was
the single person of something else speaking through each in turn.
Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of night
a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest, that its beginning and
ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs had broken silence, the
bushes had broken silence, the heather-bells had broken silence; at last, so
did the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same
discourse as theirs. Thrown out on the winds, it became twined in with
them, and with them it flew away. What she uttered was a lengthened sigh-
ing, apparently at something in her mind which had led to her presence
there. (Hardy, 56–57)
It is surely no coincidence that Hardy gives his heroine a first name

that reminds us of that part of our anatomy called the eustachian tube,
defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as ‘a bony and cartilaginous
tube connecting the middle ear with the nasopharynx and equalising air
pressure on both sides of the tympanic membrane—called also auditory
tube’. In other words, her very name is linked to the absorption and cre-
ation of sound! Adam Piette has called this relationship between person
and place in the novel, ‘the Eustacia-Heath rhyme’, and it generates a
subtly blended soundscape in the reader’s mind that in turn creates an
imaginative picture in which a woman stands alone on a bleak, lonely
hilltop that serves as a metaphor for her personal isolation:
Thomas Hardy…was an expert at demonstrating what might be termed

sonic pathetic fallacy, a supersensitive hearing of resonance between the
“sounds” of external and internal nature. These sound-resemblances go to
the heart of his sensitivity to the discrete mystery of hidden or buried feel-
ing. (Piette, 25)
We know ourselves how a ‘sense of Place’ can overwhelm us at times,

affecting our mood in a way that we find hard to identify. Hardy, and
writers like him, has the capacity to play on our memory as we read, thus
placing us beside their characters, in sympathy with them, even before we
fully understand their predicament. It is achieved by a blend of recollec-
tion of sound and situation that creates empathy, and Hardy’s minimalist
canvas of Egdon Heath is anthropomorphised as emotion, just as later in
the novel Eustacia again becomes sonically at one with her surroundings:
Between the dripping of the rain from her umbrella to her mantle, from
her mantle to the heather, from the heather to the earth, very similar
sounds could be heard coming from her lips; and the tearfulness of the
outer scene was repeated upon her face. (Hardy, 346)
It is more than simply description; Hardy is using sound repetition in

words like ‘heather’/‘earth’/‘heard’ to give a colour to the mood as well
as a sound, as the woman’s gentle but passionate sobs echo the inter-
rupted journey of raindrops, and the gradual soaking of the scene and
her face. We read the text as a musician would read a score, and as we
do so, we ‘play’ the sounds in our imagination, and translate them
into emotion, and thence into memory. Sound in this instance is liter-
ally a state of mind. The words on the page are a form of notation; we
‘hear’ them within the mind, but were we to transfer that experience
to an external form, they would require a different structure in order
to place them back in an auditory context, such as phonetics, acoustics
or sound recording. We are familiar with the term ‘record’ as an object
upon which sound is preserved, but the term ‘record’ in this context
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was devised as a signifier of the preservation of an event, just as a note

in the minutes of a formal meeting might be so perceived. In so doing,
the process gives back the sonic orality to the written word, as it would
have held meaning before print existed. R. Murray Schafer reminds us
that phonetics and acoustics ‘are descriptive—they describe sounds that
have already occurred—while musical notation is generally prescrip-
tive—it gives a recipe for sounds to be made’ (Murray Schafer, 123). We
might add, however, that a composer—or a writer—could be argued to
be ‘describing’ sounds they have already ‘heard’ in their imaginations
(Keats again). Equally, as we read, we have the capacity to ‘switch off’
our ‘listening’, either voluntarily or in spite of ourselves, just as we can
find ourselves disengaging our attention from an audio source if it ceases
to interest us, or if our mind is overwhelmed by other thoughts (The so-
called cocktail party effect).
Time and Place
Historically, the act of physically recording sound imposed a form of

reality on the mind, replacing what had previously been ‘heard’ silently.
It is interesting to note that the etymological origins of the word ‘pho-
nograph’, is as an object, as Shane Butler has reminded us, that ‘proposes
to write (graphein) the voice (phóné)’ (Butler, 11). While Edison appro-
priated the term, he did not invent it, for, as Butler explains:
[The] linguist Edward Hincks had used it earlier in the century to des-
ignate those Egyptian hieroglyphs that were “representations of sounds,”
and the word had entered the general lexicon via an invention that had
spread as rapidly as Edison’s would: Isaac Pittman’s system of short-
hand, described in his 1845 Manual of Phonography, or Writing by Sound.
(Butler, 11–12)
All these forms present examples of attempts at recreating some-

thing invisible and transitory, just as an ancient Grecian urn attempted
to preserve a moment of a temporal human emotion, the memory of an
instant imagined or actually lived. We continue to listen to the world, to
‘read’ it, as we move through our lives and as we pause and reflect on a
thought or a text.
It is here that the messages of the written word and the signals
received by the brain from broadcast sound intersect; radio has some-
times been referred to as a ‘blind’ medium. For example, the radio
historian Andrew Crisell suggests that ‘radio has its limitations, all of
which are associated with its blindness…’. In some cases, Crisell argues
‘we need visible words to help us understand invisible things’ while in
others ‘we need visible things in order to help us understand the words’
(Crisell, 6). This is not to take account of the sheer imaginative visibil-
ity of sound objects when engaged with through active listening. Taking
into account the idea of sound as ‘blind’, we might also be persuaded
that the visual (in this case in the form of the printed page) is silent.
Yet clearly it is not when it is engaged with through the mind. We may
hear the immediate sound around us, while we may stretch our minds
to imagine sounds beyond our physical hearing in the broader environ-
ment, like lateral layers moving out from our centre. The printed word
enables us to ‘hear’ sound outside our experience through imagination.
Anthony Doer’s novel, All The Light We Cannot See, set in the French
town of Saint Malo shortly after D-Day, is a book about radio, sound
and time. Alone in her great-uncle’s house, surrounded by radios and a
clandestine transmitter, a blind girl is acutely aware of the sound of her
surroundings, receding into the far distance, spreading out from the inti-
mate sounds of the room in which she is trapped, any one of which may
give her presence away to the occupying German forces:
Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling
in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields,
directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears fami-
lies sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile
to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver
and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn…she hears cows drink from
stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel;
she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below…With her free
hand, she opens the novel in her lap. (Doer, 390–1)
What the girl hears in her mind is wordless, a soundscape of the imagi-
nation. Yet, as Doer would have us understand, these sounds are actu-
ally occurring at the moment Marie-Laure senses them. The simultaneity
of sonic existence is a fact, to which the passage draws attention, heard
through suggestion in the textual pictures on the page, images that
would equally transmit themselves through the spoken word of a radio
broadcast, an audio book, or through simply being read aloud. In any of
these ‘readings’ of the text, the mind absorbs pictures.
Wilfred Owen, in his famous sonnet, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’
provides a striking contrast between sound and silence in the octave and
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the sestet. The first stanza is cacophonous; it is like listening to multiple

conflicting discordant soundtracks playing at the same time.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
Owen’s work, like that of his hero, John Keats, is full of audio, and
like Keats, he recognises the sonic potency of certain words, words that
evoke both sound and feeling at the same moment. Keats, in his ode ‘To
Autumn’ makes us hear what he sees and hears when he writes ‘…in a
wailful choir the small gnats mourn’, while Owen takes the same sound
and sends it mad. Also like Keats, it is instructive to examine how the
poem evolved, in its sonic detail. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ was writ-
ten during September and October 1917; a month earlier, Owen had
drafted a poem which has been subsequently named ‘But I was Looking at
Permanent Stars’3 in which the bugle image makes an earlier appearance:
Bugles sang, saddening the evening air,
And bugles answered, sorrowful to hear.
The evolution of the sound is clear between the two poems, and in
‘Anthem’ Owen uses it at the end of the hellish uproar of the first stanza
of the sonnet, which places us directly in the field of battle as a bridge
into future memory and the sorrow of those left behind. In the subse-
quent six lines comes a response to the seemingly unanswerable question
of the opening, an elegiac stillness, and with it a tragic gentleness:
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Like dance or abstract painting, pure sound can act on our senses to
open doors to individual worlds of imagination, each of them intensely
personal and direct, and working with our other senses—in particu-
lar sight—creates interactions and juxtapositions in the mind that are
the very stuff of poetry. The interaction between the senses operates on
numerous levels; poetic drama may have the potency of a text absorbed
in silent contemplation, while always offering the visual and audi-
tory possibilities of performance. Sound, however, is the fundamental
medium of storytelling, as witness Shakespeare’s words in King Lear, a
play which revolves crucially around the relationship between seeing and
not seeing, imaginary perceptions and reality. Near the end of the play,
Lear has this exchange with the blinded Gloucester:
Lear.: …you see how the world goes.
Glos.: I see it feelingly.
Lear.: What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes, with no
eyes. Look with thine ears (Act 4, Scene 6).
Earlier in the same scene, Gloucester, seeking to throw himself from

a cliff top to his death at Dover, is persuaded by Edgar through word
imagery alone that he stands in just such a vertiginous place:
Edg.: Come on sir; here’s the place; stand still.–How fearful

And dizzy ‘tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows, and choughs, that wing the mid-way air,
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
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The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,

Appear like mice; and yon tall anchoring bark,
Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high… (Ibid.)
Without his sight, Gloucester receives the images created by Edgar’s

storytelling as a kind of sound poem, his mind in partnership with the
maker of the ‘pictures’, an ancient connection that belongs to the time
when there was no written text, but only an orality communicating
sacred and secular stories and myths. It is an innate skill we all possess,
yet this kind of intense poetic response-experience—transferred to the
everyday world—requires attention, the part-learned, part-intuitive dis-
cipline of active listening, in which the relationship between the mind
and the ear is trained in a relationship with the world that is sensitive and
tuned by instinct as well as by the search for meaning.
Drama as a visually read text provides silent sound through imagina-
tion, but as performance uses the space between words in a physically
active way. Many dramatists have employed this device in a positive sense,
to take the meaning to places where words cannot go. Samuel Beckett
and Harold Pinter are prime examples of writers for whom mood, atmos-
phere and plot subtly change during these apparently blank windows that
are nevertheless choreographed as an integral part of dialogue. Yeang Chui
reminds us that ‘in Pinter’s plays, these harmless stage directions become
tools of subjugation’ (Chui, p. 46). Pinter is famous for using the pause
in this way; indeed, as the theatre director Peter Hall has said, within the
context of dramas such as, for example, The Birthday Party or The Dwarfs,
the pause is a part of dialogue too active to be referred to as ‘silence’ at all:
A pause is really a bridge where the audience think[s] that you’re this side of
the river, then when you speak again, you’re the other side. That’s a pause…
[…] It’s a gap, which retrospectively gets filled in. It’s not a dead stop –
that’s a silence, where the confrontation has become too extreme, there’s
nothing to be said until either the temperature goes down, or the tempera-
ture has gone up, and then something quite extreme happens. (Batty, 164)
Words—and the spaces between them—can transmit pictures physi-

cally through the ears and the brain in concert with the eyes, but as
we have seen, we are capable of consuming signals from a silent object
through the imagination. Hardy’s characters absorb environment and
merge with the place in which their imagined lives live and breath. It is
also true that Hardy’s novels have been a fruitful field for adaptation, in
radio, in audio books and in film. This is significant because certain writ-
ers, while providing the clues from which we build our own soundtrack,
may also offer imagery so seductive and stories so pertinent to the
human condition, that they can exist—sometimes even more viscerally—
in the adapted form as well as the original.
For the maker of visual images, however, there is a dangerous set of
considerations to encounter: what does the mind need with second-hand
images when it can create its own? Why do I need a radio presenter to
tell me what I am hearing, when I can build my own playlist in my head,
or on my smartphone? The image that interprets a sound may be too
literal, while the image from which the sound is removed may have the
capacity to burn itself into memory, just as the sound without the picture
can become a part of our very self. The film editor and sound designer
Walter Murch, famous for works such as Apocalypse Now and The
Conversation (both made with Francis Ford Coppola), has expressed the
idea that the imaginative part in a film soundtrack has the capacity to be
more positively interactive with the audience and that ‘the perfect sound
film has zero tracks. You try to get the audience to a point, somehow,
where they can imagine the sound. They hear the sound in their minds,
and it really isn’t on the track at all. That’s the ideal sound, the one that
exists totally in the mind, because it’s the most intimate’ (Murch in Weiss
and Belton, 359). The present writer remembers attending a screening
of Carl Dreyer’s silent film masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc. In the
event, the movie was shown completely silently, without the ‘comment’
of music. A whole cinema audience sat in rapt stillness for 90 min, as
the pictures burned themselves into the mind, and the imagined sound
played in our heads. Just as sound can evoke pictures, so too can pic-
tures make sound in the mind, be those pictures physical or words on a
printed page. Early cinema was silent, and so its meanings were totally
international; the visual message, often underlined by a musical commen-
tary, was universal. Silence that accompanies the visual, like pure sound,
requires no interpreter because it is open to individual interpretation. It
is only when a specific language is introduced that the barriers appear.
Sonic Cartography
Not only do I inherit the sound of my environment, I become at
one with it. When I consider this, I might take into account the liv-
ing existences within a landscape, say birdsong, animal life in the
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undergrowth, wind in trees, the ambience of the air, the distant rumble
of industry and so on. On the other hand, the imagination can stretch
its quest for silent sound into the very fabric of the earth itself. It is
perhaps obvious that I can see and hear further through air and space
than I can through matter, but nevertheless it might on reflection seem
strange that the earth and the other substances upon which I stand
should yield so little sound.4 In his essay, Bedrocked, Robert Macfarlane
wrote:
The earth’s skin stops sight short, and what is beneath grass or ground is
lost to view, and largely lost to knowledge. We might call it the underland,
perhaps, this vast and invisible dominion of rock and soil, rifts and mines,
chambers and veins, dykes and tunnels, and minerals and groundwater, to
the roof of which we are all moored by gravity. (Macfarlane in Stenger, 11)
What if maps could talk? What if the cartography of shape and place
could be tethered to the cartography of thought and imagination?
What if the earth’s apparently silent voice could be translated into
sound? In 2015, the AV Festival in the North East of England toured
a sound installation by Susan Stenger, called Sound Strata of Coastal
Northumberland. Stenger’s 59-min work was a sonic representation of a
12-m-long hand-drawn cross-sectional map of the coastal strata from the
River Tyne to the River Tweed, created by a nineteenth-century min-
ing engineer and cartographer called Nicholas Wood. Her work in this
context is based on the sound of drones from Northumbrian pipes, a
bed upon which other sounds—song, industry and imaginative abstract
compositional techniques—riff and intertwine. In an essay accompany-
ing his map, Wood referred to the area under his consideration, from
Newcastle to Berwick-upon-Tweed in musical terms, as a ‘suite of rocks’.
Stenger in her turn gave terrain, geology and cultural history a range of
voices that overlaid one another as do the strata of the earth’s fabric. In
other words, she ‘read’ Wood’s ‘score’ imaginatively and articulated it in
sound.
This is exactly what we do within our head when we read a poem or
a book, a mental process that gives us the instrumentation to orchestrate
the printed codes into imagery. In fact, the internal process goes further,
turns 365°, because it takes a picture, be it a visual or an audio image
created by another mind, filters it through the neutral medium of words
and reinvents it through personal experience and circumstance to make a
drama that in turn is mitigated by our own personality and placed in our
memory bank. Gilles Deleuze has written: ‘Musical art has two aspects,
one which is something like a dance of molecules that reveal materiality,
the other is the establishment of human relationships in their sound mat-
ter’ (quoted in Stenger, 15). The miracle of composition is the revelation
of patterns of sound placed on silence that touch a chord of recognition
in us. We are each of us composers, and our orchestra is our imagination.
Stenger’s sound work is rooted in a partnership with the visual. As she
has said: ‘When I think about a new sound work I often visualise it and
draw my ideas. I can thank my art teacher mother for this; she taught
me about visual composition—organising line, shape, texture, colour—at
a very young age…’ (Stenger, 52). She adds elsewhere, ‘I think “sonic
incarnation” is a good term’ (Stenger, 63). So it is.
Stenger’s term may be applied here not only to a sound version of
a visual object, but as a response that reflects the individual subjective
‘sound incarnation’ of the observer or listener.
When we listen, even to apparently nothing, we are hearing our-
selves, in the context of our environment. Susan Sontag reflected this
in terms of the visual when she pointed out that to look at nothingness
or emptiness it still to see something, even if it be a projection of our
own selves.5 It may be intensified by will or by experience, as John Cage
proved in 4′33″. The artist and composer Esther Venrooij developed this
theme:
Being silent as a musician in an orchestra is an important part of the whole

experience. Waiting for the start of a musical line and attending to notated
rests are essential in musical performance. In all compositions there is a
silent part. It is not the part of the conductor, but a silent voice. This silent
voice is present before the musicians start playing, it follows along in time
with the musical composition, it is audible when the musician remain
silent or take a break, and it is still present after the final note. (Venrooij in
Stephanides and Kohlmaier, p. 96)
We are not only surrounded by sound, as we shall discuss in the next

chapter, in a real sense, we are sound, insofar as our thoughts, memo-
ries and reactions manifest themselves within our head in a kind of silent
sound that plays continually, even during sleep. Because, although we
may close our eyes, we cannot close our ears, so our personal soundtrack,
while playing the song of our personality, changing and growing, is fed
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by external sound experiences that aid and affect that development. Two
people may look at the same Grecian urn, and while one might hear a
narrative, there is no saying that it will be the one Keats heard, while the
other may hear nothing at all, but experience the object in other ways.
Further, our sonic interaction with the object—if there is one—may well
be affected by the environment in which the object is placed. Listening
to a Greek vase in an echoing gallery of the British Museum, full of tour-
ist parties and conversation, will play into the mind in a different way
to experiencing the same object in the stillness of a living room, so the
blend of imaginative ‘tuning’ by the mind and external circumstance
improvise a kind of jazz that makes the event different between individu-
als, and changed every time the experience is replicated. Likewise, the
experience of listening to Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland is a
very different one for me now, as I play the CD version of it, and hear it
through headphones, to the way I first heard it, in the acoustic environ-
ment of the Gymnasium Gallery at Berwick-upon-Tweed in the spring
of 2015, on a stormy day, with the sound of trees and distant sea-wash
outside. As Stenger has said herself:
Since the nature of sound waves is that they move in space, to be able to
stand inside them – to feel them passing through you – is an important
part of Sound Strata. The ability to be inside sonic structures, to perceive
them in both an intellectual and visceral way, makes you feel like you’ve
almost become part of the structure yourself. The stereo CD version…
sounds great, but it can only evoke the work in one way, since it can’t rec-
reate the experience of being in the space. (Stenger, 64)
One would only add to that last statement that for anyone who has first
experienced the work in situ, the CD does in a way recreate the ‘live’
event—through memory, just as a recording of a concert performance
has the capacity for taking us back to the memory of being part of it,
without reproducing the exact acoustic conditions or our responses to
them, that pertained at the time. To return, however, to the immedi-
ate point, someone other than Stenger, presented with the same com-
mission, would of course have come to a different answer. Her use of the
pipers’ drones as a motif through the piece acts as a kind of metaphor for
the underlying sound bed upon we each of us build our sonic world. So
it is with a read text. We respond—or not—according to a blend of past
experience and the emotional strings, all tuned differently, that vibrate in
various ways within us.
Environment is clearly part of the content surrounding the bub-
ble of concentration in which we interact with focused silent listen-
ing. The disconnection between read images ‘heard’ while on a bus
or a busy commuter train is a part of the overall imaginative/memory
experience. Just as we may listen to a sound picture of waves break-
ing on a South Seas beach while travelling through a suburban travel
interchange, and thus have two sensory worlds sitting beside one
another in our heads, so it is that hearing a written text silently cre-
ates a dichotomy between fantasy and reality, or perhaps one should
say, two kinds of reality in parallel. Whether it be physical or imagina-
tive listening, Salomé Voegelin is right to suggest that ‘listening allows
fantasy to reassemble the visual fixtures and fittings, and repositions
us as designers of our own environment’ (Voegelin, 12). Nevertheless,
the noise of the world changes the rules of what the composer Pauline
Oliveros has called ‘deep listening’, and we must focus and concen-
trate more if we are to find the stillness within us that is capable of
absorbing the subtle sounds that are usually the most significant and
rewarding. Stare at an apparently black night sky long enough, and
you begin to see stars; likewise, if we consciously and actively listen
with complete attention, we can focus on sounds of which we were
previously unaware. If we can switch attention to the most interesting
conversation in a cocktail party, we can do this. Oliveros refers to it as
‘sound fishing’:
Listening for what has not yet sounded – like a fisherman waiting for a nib-
ble or a bite…Pull the sound out of the air like a fisherman catching a fish,
sensing its size and energy…There are sounds in the air like sounds in the
water. When the water is clear you might see the fish. When the air is clear,
you might hear the sounds. (Oliveros, 50)
Making this a conscious decision is liberating. We are actively involved

participants in this world of sound, just as we are a part of the natural
world. We can be as much—or as little—integrated into the partnership
as we choose to be, but the important realisation is that we are interac-
tive creatures, and we have choice as practitioners in the exchange as
to whether and how we break our inner silence. Further, we can do
more than listen for silence and break silence: we can make silence, for
34 S. STREET
that inner silence is our most intimate possession. A loud sound can
produce a phantom echo, like the after-image from blinking at a bright
light. It can exist in silence, as it continues to exist in memory, and
powerful emotions have a form of psychic sonic life, capable at times
of delivering a spiritual seismic shock. Venrooij has attempted to repro-
duce this phenomenon in some of her early compositions, that is to say,
to create the sensation of an experience of a sound without the sound
itself being present. ‘By meticulously placing a very specific sound in
a (horizontal/vertical) composition, this sound would still resonate
in the listener’s mind after composition’ (Venrooij in Stephanides and
Kohlmaier, 97).
A work of art can only fully exist when it is experienced, and
whether we ‘hear’ it through reading, remember it or imagine it,
we are ultimately both receiver and instrument. The point is we can
‘hear’ a thought within ourselves before it has been expressed. To
return to Gaston Bachelard, invoked at the beginning of this chapter,
‘the spoken word is, as far as we can determine, projected before it
is heard. According to the principle of projection, the word is willed
before it is spoken. In this way, pure poetry is formed in the realm of
the will before appearing on the emotional level’ (Bachelard, 244).
If this is so in the making, it is surely true in the reading, a kind of
thought transference; indeed, we sometimes use a phrase when
describing an idea that communicates on this level, that it ‘speaks to
us’, and these are the moments we retain within ourselves. ‘Music,
when sweet voices die,/Vibrates in the memory…’ wrote Percy
Bysshe Shelley. Later in the nineteenth century, the Jesuit poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins might have been answering both Shelley and John
Keats when he wrote:
Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.6

Notes
1. Scott, Sir Walter, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, Canto II, stanza 1.
2. See Motion, Keats, pp. 390–392.
3. See Stallworthy, Jon, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, p. 179.
4. Later in this book, we shall discuss the issue of non-cochlear sound, vibra-
tion and the body as conductor.
5. Sontag, Susan, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ in Styles of Radical Will
(Picador, 2002).
6. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, ‘The Habit of Perfection’.
CHAPTER 3
Transmitters and Receivers: Shared

and Selected Sound
Abstract  Technologies—media—interact with the mind in its sound-

making process, in the same way as the mind interprets and creates inter-
nal sound in the imagination through its responses to the scanning of
codes and information gleaned from the printed word and other visual
stimuli such as art. Sonic signals from radio and other audio sources trig-
ger recognition and develop the identification of self in relation to the
world around us. We choose our listening, just as we choose our clothing
and what we read, but we absorb other programmed information along
the way too, including ideas of tribal, political, cultural and national
identity that contextualise us as part of a community. Anthems, popular
and national—the sonic equivalent of flags—are one such source of this
identity: we are part of a tribe as well as our own self.
Keywords  Radio · Tribal Sounds · Anthems · Group Identity

Political Agenda
Tuning in
‘Live’ radio is different to podcasts or recordings. Listening to ‘Live’
radio allows us personal imaginative engagement, whether it be with a
song—a voice or an idea—while enabling us to feel part of a commu-
nal experience at the same time. We are aware that others are tuning in,
interacting mentally with the moment. With television it is different,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58676-2_3
38 S. STREET
because there the experience is more observational than immersive. One

of the strengths of radio is often cited as being that it is a secondary
medium: we can work at another activity, housework or driving, while
absorbing the sound. In reality, imaginative radio provides the opposite
experience; it is quite common to find, when driving while listening to
in-car entertainment, that the details of the journey itself are barely reg-
istered in retrospect, while the object of listening is retained in the mind.
We absorb real sound just as we absorb the words on a page; it is poured
into our imagination, and our inner silence digests it. So this internal
stillness is actually never really a silence at all, simply a bed upon which
an intrusion of welcome or unwelcome signals seeps into our personal
receiver. We are our own commentators, talking to ourselves, explain-
ing our situation to the mysterious being who quietly listens. As Alison
Gopnik writes:
This babbling stream of consciousness is closely related to our sense of per-

sonal identity. My experiences happen to me…But who is this “I”? She is
the inner observer with the front row seat watching my life unfold. She is
the constant self who unites my memories of the past and my anticipations
of the future. She is the person my life has happened to, the person who
plans the rest of that life, and the person who is the beneficiary of those
plans. She is my inner eye, my autobiographer, and my CEO. (Gopnik,
133–4)
Descartes famously said the same thing in five words,1 and it is the nar-
rowcast of the self that we must explore later, because the inner ver-
balisation of impressions and experiences is our silent but constant
personalised radio station, without which all the other senses, includ-
ing sight, founder. In Annie Dillard’s words, ‘unless I call my attention
to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it…I have to say the
words, describe what I’m seeing…I have to maintain in my head a run-
ning description of the present…otherwise, especially in a strange place,
I’ll never know what’s happening…Like a blind man at the ball game, I
need a radio’ (Dillard, 33).
As we live and grow, we absorb sounds and subconsciously build them
into the fabric of our personality. These we might refer to as codes that
open up channels of response, rather in the way that a PIN fed into an
ATM machine gives us access to information and funds. Thus, a circu-
lar process begins at birth that interacts with our senses as we develop
3 TRANSMITTERS AND RECEIVERS: SHARED AND SELECTED SOUND 39
sympathetic or antipathetic responses, which in turn feed into future

attitudes. We might observe that our views, prejudices and proclivities
become more entrenched as we grow older; little wonder, since there is
a tendency for the build-up of experience to fuel support for the ideas
we have already developed and to which we may cling. In a more posi-
tive sense, remaining open to new ideas and concepts breaks into prej-
udice and withers it, widening horizons and expanding mental capacity
to embrace yet more chains of consequence and possibility. So it is with
sound. An infant, as he or she begins to interact with the world, holds
up a wide omnidirectional microphone to the world; this is the first pro-
cess of learning. An adult exchanges this panoramic field for something
much more directional, tightly focused, aimed at the matter in hand. As
a rule, that is, the rule is broken when the adult is placed in a completely
alien environment, say when visiting a country or a city for the first time.
Then, they find themselves looking for codes that match their under-
standing, while, like the child, directing our omnidirectional microphone
at everything around us in an attempt to create a new context for them-
selves.
With music, we begin by sampling everything, quickly learning selec-
tivity, taking from the sound menu of things that interest us and to
which we can relate, given the sonic diet that is presented to us. From
this point, musical taste and choice is in a way a kind of self-fulfilling
set of responses; we may say, ‘I love Mozart’, or ‘I’m a big fan of The
Beatles’. Fed by this decision, we buy up the music and put it on our
shelves and declare when invited to do so that this is our favourite music.
It is the same with literature and painting—indeed with anything that
feeds into our sensory responses. We build fan clubs within ourselves,
perhaps at the risk of erecting barriers to new experience. There may be
times when we yearn to regain the innocent ear that was sensationally
affected by a sound memory which subsequently became a life memory.
Such moments may yet continue to touch us, however, and the most
likely element to open the door is that of surprise. Some years ago, a
popular UK classical music station ran a regular feature under precisely
that name. The listener was played a recording of an unidentified piece
of music. The game was to decide at least who wrote it, and usually it
came as a surprise to find out the answer. Another ploy used was to play
a piece and then say, ‘if you liked that, you’ll like this’. Such a prescrip-
tive device could be more controversial. On the one hand, it might well
take the listener down a road of discovery, while on the other, it could
40 S. STREET
be said that it held the response within narrow parameters of experience.

There would seem to be little question that such a principle can work;
one only has to examine the policies of online shopping websites to see it
in action.
Once in a while, there breaks in on us a completely new dance of
sounds, using the surprise element to undermine our prejudices before
they have time to form. Such a moment in mass consciousness was the
first performance of John Tavener’s work for ‘cello and orchestra, The
Protecting Veil, commissioned by the cellist Steven Isserlis and given its
premiere performance at the 1989 BBC Proms season. It caused a sensa-
tion, partly because of its serene beauty, and partly because the audience
had little reference for it; coming in the middle of a concert of various
other classical works, suddenly this almost static music broke into the
world of expectation and created a new starting point from which fresh
sound journeys could begin. For me, as a schoolboy, such a moment was
caused by hearing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring for the first time. The
work seemed to obey no musical laws I was aware of, it sounded like
nothing I had ever heard, and it created such a revolution in my young
mind that the circumstance and location of that first hearing remain
indelibly printed on my memory. True, one might argue that a child is
more impressionable and thus such experiences have more potency, but,
as with the communal response to The Protecting Veil, these moments of
sonic revelation are possible at every stage of life.
Indeed, the place itself may provide moments of sonic discovery. We
grow and live within our environments, and to be rooted in a place is
to acknowledge some form of shared identity with that place, and eve-
rywhere has its own sound, if we are tuned enough to hear it. Mostly,
we move within our landscapes, cities and towns with a familiarity that
prohibits the sense of uniqueness within the soundscape of a particular
place; we are, in other words, so used to it that we take it for granted and
fail to listen. Presented with a new environment, our first response is the
same as that of a child; we hear all its novelty and strangeness, even if we
do not register it, under the power as we are, of the tyranny of the visual.
To consciously listen, however, is to be aware of the character of a place,
which in turn must infiltrate the personalities of everyone who lives in
that place permanently. Certain situations and sets of circumstances may
put us, even within familiar surroundings, into a new awareness of place
as a purely auditory experience; for the academic John Hull, adjusting
his life to the loss of sight, the interrelation of sound and vision created a
sense of a reality suddenly strange, that had to be reinterpreted once one

of these senses was removed. Sitting on a park bench, on a day out with
his children, he became powerfully conscious of how, in blindness, a lack
of sound denotes an absence:
The acoustic world is one in which things pass in and out of existence…
There is a sudden cry from the lake, ‘Hello, Daddy!’; my children are there
in their paddle boat. Previously, a moment ago, they were not there. Not
until they greeted me with a cry could I distinguish them from the rest of
the background sounds. (Hull, 73)
For Hull then, there is a sense of passivity; he must await audio clues to
bring forth elements of the world, and yet ‘this is a world which I cannot
shut out, which goes on around me, and which gets on with its own life’
(ibid., 74). Each place becomes a revisited place, encountered through
the codes of acoustic space. It is, as Hull says, ‘a world of revelation’ just
as for the Australian sound artist and scholar, Colin Black expresses the
sounds and sights of an unfamiliar city:
I love the sound of the trams in Melbourne and the ferries in Sydney. It
may sound strange but the winter air sounds different to me in the two
cities. The pace of the language and footsteps on a whole sounds different.
The emerging themes in the words that you overhear in public (the seman-
tic wordscape) are different. The speech melodies on a whole are different.
The architecture of each city creates a different set of ambiences to interact
with.2
Such happenings, when in an involuntary way we are precipitated into

new sensory experiences, mark staging posts in the development of our
identity. When they happen in the concert hall or the theatre, they are
seen to be affecting mass and individual identity at the same time; we each
of us are changed by the event and are able to subsequently share our
impressions with others who may be sympathetic to our responses. Kate
Lacey has drawn attention to the coming of radio as such a moment on a
mass scale. It was as she has said, ‘a sensation in both senses of the word’,
and the arrival of such a huge and instantaneous sensory experience
caused doubts in the minds of some as to whether its absorption might
have a profound effect on the human spirit. The individual as a compo-
nent of what was now perceived as a mass was susceptible to cause and
42 S. STREET
effect in a way previously unknown. The democratisation of knowledge

and culture, the fact that, for instance, a play parodying the mores and
habits of a particular class, could now be experienced instantly by people
of all classes, was seen by some as requiring a change in disposition, as well
as, more significantly, an awareness that personal ideas could be shared or
corroborated across a previously divided society.
The creation of radio fed into a human instinct to seek and find infor-
mation in the world around us that began with the birth of the species,
a state of alertness. Early listeners were said to be ‘listeners-in’, tuning
to the wireless to ‘listen in’ to whatever the new medium had to offer.
The BBC’s first manager, John Reith, discouraged the use of the phrase,
claiming that it implied something clandestine, eavesdropping: in other
words unauthorised listening, that is to say, without a licence to do so.
Thus, the preferred word became ‘listeners’. Nevertheless, the earlier
phrase had something telling about it; there is an urgency in the phrase,
to ‘listen in’, the picture becomes one of an individual leaning forward
to catch something, be it intended for them or not. It implies a commit-
ment. Contrast this with the phrase, to ‘listen out’. Lacey has pointed
out that ‘“to listen” is both an intransitive and a transitive verb. In other
words, it is possible to listen without necessarily listening to anything.
Listening can therefore be understood as being in a state of anticipation,
of listening out for something’ (Lacey, 7).
In the domestic environment, a radio may play a constant accompani-
ment to our everyday lives, usually switched on to a favourite station,
heard but only partially attended to for much of the time. Yet we have
the capacity to focus when required. We may be working on home-
work, chores, or we may be driving, and while doing so, we hear this
background soundtrack. Then something catches our attention. It may
be a particular song, a voice, a statement, an argument or a news flash.
Suddenly we switch from hearing to listening consciously. This does not
mean that the ‘unlistened-to’ material was not absorbed, but that we
have tuned ourselves to the sound more acutely. Music is a particular
case in point. For many, the idea of carrying out the simple functions of
living would be unthinkable without the accompaniment of music radio.
That said, if the music on the station is too entertaining, as we have seen,
we switch our attention and lose the ability to concentrate on the pri-
mary task in hand. At the same time, if the music is not to our liking at
all, our antipathetic response also destroys our focus. There must there-
fore be a middle ground where these external sounds stimulate but do
not exert their demands on our minds to the extent that they become
our sole preoccupation. Radios transmit, but the human mind transmits
and receives, often virtually simultaneously. While that is the case, there
are optimum conditions that exist to enable it to do so at its maximum
efficiency. Each of us is our own station, and so we vary to an almost infi-
nite degree in our responses. There are numerous issues relating to how
our subtle responders are affected by what we absorb, and as the journal-
ist Dean Burnett wrote, each of us is different:
Given the extreme variation in musical preferences from person to per-

son, exposing your workforce or classroom to a single type of music
would obviously end up with mixed results. Music also has a big impact
on mood—truly bleak music could sap your enthusiasm for your task.
Something else to look out for is music with catchy lyrics. Musical pieces
without words might be better working companions, as human speech and
vocalisation is something our brains pay particular attention to.3
Such thinking has roots in the research of psychologists such as Daniel

Berlyne, whose work drew attention to reactions and responses to curi-
osity and arousal, as well as to the effects of these on the human brain.
Berlyne considered that this impacted mentally on three levels: psycho-
physical, environmental and collative, this last being the term he chose to
identify our responses to stimuli including complexity, incongruity and
surprise/novelty. His view was that response is at its most effective when
at a moderate arousal level and influenced by the novelty and complexity
of the object (in the current context); that is to say music or other forms
of sound.
In his work, Berlyne invoked that of an earlier philosopher and physi-
ologist, Wilhelm Wundt, and in particular, a form of emotional meas-
urement called the Wundt Curve, which he identified as an inverted
‘U-shaped curve’. His theory was that if the potential for arousal
in music was too high or too low, the listener would reject it. Speed,
rhythm and loudness are all factors. ‘According to this relationship,
increased complexity correlates positively with liking, arousal and pleas-
ure up to an optimal point, after which a further increase reverses the
effect’.4 While this is useful to consider, it remains subjective to per-
sonal taste, based on memory and experience: what arouses one person,
repels another, so the U-shaped curve might be operating in opposite
directions for two people sitting side by side, exposed to the same audio
44 S. STREET
experience. Thus, to return to Burnett’s point above, our personali-

ties require the presence of personalised radio stations, or other sound
sources, to enhance our own individual environment. Whatever its
source, we acquire ownership, and through that, membership of a sound
tribe, whether or not we acknowledge the fact in ourselves.
Sound Badges
Our playlists build, inform and enhance our sense of personal identity,
while at the same time helping us to align ourselves with like minds. A
product of the audio cassette medium between the 1970s and 1990s, the
concept of the mix-tape embodies this idea. We may learn as much about
a new acquaintance by examining their music collection as by looking at
the spines of the books on their shelves, and a mix-tape became a means
of demonstrating to a new acquaintance where one stood in terms of
taste and choice. In closer relationships, it was a means of sharing mutual
musical identity and holding a moment in time as a component of future
memory. Thus, the mix-tape was both a statement of ‘who I am now’ (or
‘who we are’) and potentially a memorial preserved for later times, when
it would serve as a time capsule of experience, in turn evoking an outward
ripple of associated memory. Bas Jansen, in exploring the use of cassettes
in preserving former selves, invokes the concept of two forms of personal
identity as encapsulated by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur in the Latin
words idem, meaning sameness, and ipse, meaning self: ‘Ricoeur relates
idem-identity to a person’s inclinations, habits and identifications…Ipse-
identity is closely tied to the first-person dimension of experience’ (Jansen
in Bijsterveld & van Dijck, 43). A mix-tape does what a conventional
radio station cannot do; it preserves the sound identity of the individual
at a particular moment and has the capacity for sharing that identity as an
offering of both ipse-identity and idem-identity. It is, however, primarily a
statement of the self that created it in the first place. Thus, it is potentially
a means of regaining a former self, a sense of what it was like to be the
same person in a different time in a first-person experience:
An analysis of the sensation will not bring into focus the “experiencer,”
but only the conditions and the elements of the life-world which gave the
listener’s past experience its particular “feel,” as if these conditions and ele-
ments had been kept exactly as they had been in a time capsule, or as if a
time machine had taken the listener back to them. (Ibid., 51)
This, Jansen argues, is different to looking at an old photograph of one-

self, in which the image is frozen. Sound is linear, moving through time,
and thus, recorded sound becomes a metaphor for a life lived, and each
sonic moment has the capacity to contain its own image and memory.
Imagination places us as the person we were, linked to our present self
through a succession of sound moments. Mix-tapes are therefore ‘a form
of self-expression or an element of lifestyle, which implicitly links it to the
tape compiler’s character and identifier, and thus to idem-identity’ (Ibid.).
From choice, we wear our music as a badge to identify ourselves to
other members of the tribe. It becomes a part of us to the extent that we
quote it, memorise it and sing it in unison with other tribal members at
concerts and festivals, linking us to an age-long tradition of community
singing whereby people who might be perceived as otherwise complete
strangers are brought together as one voice. The band onstage may stop
singing altogether, mid-song, confident that we, their faithful followers,
have the knowledge to continue in their place. A classic example of such
communal moments often occurs at soccer or other sports stadia dur-
ing an event; thousands of supporters from both sides sing songs and
chants that hold a shared understanding for one another and the team
of their choice, while for outsiders the ritual may be bewildering. Often
such events will include points of repetition, and repetition—or a song’s
‘hook’—is a key component of memory, with such aspects of popular
music gaining the term, ‘anthemic’. In an article written for the Daily
Telegraph in April 2016, the journalist Neil McCormick wrote that ‘at
the heart of a song is a mystery, the way it interacts with the memories
and experience of the listener to become something intensely personal.
More than any other form of artistic expression, people claim songs as
their own’. Included in its top twenty songs of all time, in McCormick’s
public opinion, were recordings as diverse as ‘Let it Be’ by The Beatles,
‘Redemption Song’ by Bob Marley, ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba and
‘We’ll Meet Again’ by Vera Lynn. In each of these, it is not hard to
understand the appeal: every one has a strong emotional pull, linked to a
generation, a class or an ethnic group, as well as a chorus or ‘hook’ that
feeds into memory and enables continued repetition of a central theme.
As McCormick adds, ‘any such list will always be personal rather than
definitive—we all have songs that sing in our hearts’. That said, ‘part of
the beauty of a song is the way we share it…Some are karaoke standards,
the songs we sing to make sense of our lives, while some have a different
kind of greatness, pushing further and deeper in recalling experience’.5
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Most potent of all in terms of group identity are anthemic songs

that belong to a tightly perceived social group, songs that require, as
it were, ‘inside knowledge’ denoting a form and sense of membership.
Notable in this would be songs that are part of a generation or social
divide; when young, we do not want to be identified as part of the same
group as our parents. In the 1960s, this was helped by the develop-
ment of the transistor, enabling young people to carry their music with
them in the form of pocket-sized radios, such as the revolutionary Sony
TR620. Introduced in 1960, it was not the first transistor radio by any
means, but its compact size—8.89 cms by 6.85 cms—made it the fore-
runner of a huge boom in miniaturisation. A teenager tuning to Radio
Luxembourg or one of the offshore ‘pirate’ stations could feel com-
pletely independent and released from a culture of domestic receivers
that were operated under parental control. In this way, music could be
absorbed and learnt by heart, and cultural anthems ‘owned’ as part of
identity.
Before proceeding, it is necessarily to define the term, ‘anthem’
as it has a number of meanings, all of which interlink as expres-
sions of group identity. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it ‘a
composition in prose (usually from the Scriptures or Liturgy) set
to music for sacred use.’ Interestingly it is also defined in 1628 as a
verb, that is to say, ‘to anthem’ meaning ‘to celebrate in an anthem’,
and here the alternative meaning is ‘to chant’, which etymologi-
cally is significant to other usages. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary
has two linked definitions: ‘a formal song of loyalty, praise, or hap-
piness’, and ‘a song that is important to a particular group of people’.
All these meanings point to the use of the word ‘anthem’ as linking the
individual identity to that of the group, be it the supporters of a rock
band, a religious order or a country. Possibly the earliest anthems learnt
as we grow are those encountered during religious rituals; hymns and
carols taught to children, often remain a part of their make-up through-
out life. A hymn contains all the elements of the anthem: it contains
memorable—or at least easily absorbed—words, and tune that the mind
can quickly learn and retain. It is also an integral part of worship, join-
ing the individual to the congregation in a mutual act, affirming belief
and faith. In other words, an anthem is a kind of audio flag, a demon-
stration of ‘where I stand’ in relation to its object. Inevitably this voice
can be appropriated and exploited for commercial, political or manipu-
lative gain, homogenising a personal voice that becomes shared, into
an amorphous bland noise, undistinguished but inoffensive and there-

fore saleable, marketable and acceptable. Anthems may be more about
control than personal expression. Thus, music and poetry diverge once
more, as Seth Kim-Cohen has written:
Once upon a time, popular music was the music of the populace. As
opposed to the official music of the state or the church, the people had
their own tunes, their own lyrics, their own instruments and techniques.
As such, popular music was an oppositional music, a sometimes explicit
and sometimes implicit act of resistance to the message embedded in the
music of power. But as imperious power is replaced by commodity power,
the mode and manner of popular music is converted into a style, complete
with an attendant industry and marketplace. (Kim-Cohen, 138)
In the uncertain political and cultural world of the twenty-first century,

anthems of supposed personal expression and national or group iden-
tity may be seen to be an aggressive statement of position and affiliation
within society.
The development of technology enables the personalisation of sound
linked to portability to enhance the confirmation of a sonic self, car-
ried with us everywhere, as if to confirm to ourselves our own identity;
in place of the miniature transistorised portable radio, the smartphone
carries everything we need in order to tune to our sonic identity, with
the capacity to transmit this identity to others in the tribe. We play
our anthems as we move through the world, listening on headsets that
detach us from the physical spaces we inhabit, attending to the sound
of ourselves while dealing with the necessaries of living. In this sense,
musical soundtracks create a parallel sense of being, affecting us sublim-
inally and sometimes enabling the curious dislocation discussed earlier,
whereby we move through one physical world while mentally occupy-
ing another. Feeding ourselves, as it were intravenously, with sound is a
highly potent form of consumption; the ‘message’ bypasses other senses
and goes straight to the mind, building itself into our being both con-
sciously and subconsciously. Radio programmers know this, and advertis-
ing executives spend money and time on scheduling the right message in
the right place. Radio stations seek to hold our loyalty, not only through
the content but in terms of the presentation, speaking to the individual,
promoting the artificial kinship between broadcaster and listener through
a range of recognisable sound codes. The very phrase, ‘station ident’
48 S. STREET
encapsulates the importance of the audio badge that states ‘you are
tuned to the right place—don’t touch that dial’. The relationship at its
best is intimate, powerful and strong enough to not only create remark-
able brand loyalty, but on occasion, to change a life, and highlighting the
potential for a voice or song to send its greetings to the solitary.
Sound Inside the Mind

Politicians, businesses and media programmers choose to release key
statements and stories at times of mass audience attention, frequently
during morning radio and TV schedules, or in time to catch the evening
news. A breaking story as we enter the conscious world in the morning
has the capacity to stay with us all day, a talking point that we ourselves
may help to disseminate through casual conversation, if the message
and the images are powerful enough. Likewise, at the end of the day,
we are receptive to news because our desire for information requires that
we catch up with events that our working day has prohibited us from
absorbing earlier. Television observes the convention of late-night news.
A psychologist would surely have something to say about a mind that
absorbs the troubles and controversies of the world immediately prior to
seeking sleep! Nevertheless, it clearly suits political and media organisa-
tions that our subconscious remains informed as we take these things
into a dormant state, ready to awaken hungry for the latest updates. This
constant diet moves between the single listener or viewer and the mass
audience, touching one and the other at precisely the same moment.
Little wonder media is such a powerful weapon, placing the message eve-
rywhere simultaneously. We broadcast signals as we broadcast seed on
the land; it scatters and grows individual organisms, once it is sown. A
word, a catchphrase or a style of rhetoric can become an anthem, sung in
the head and burnt into memory. It is the euphony of I have a dream, or
Ich bin ein Berliner, almost as much as the meaning and implication, that
carry the moment forward into history. The power of sound to bring
a mass audience to its feet, either literally or figuratively, is chillingly
demonstrable in the theatre of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, particularly
those held between 1933 and 1938 in the Nazi party’s rally grounds.
The sense of scale and expectation that was deliberately created at these
events, not unlike the build-up to an arena-style rock concert, set a tone
upon which the orators could build towards a crescendo.
When we rise and place our hands on our hearts as one, and sing the
memorised words of a national anthem, we become at once a statement
of ourselves, a member of a tribe and a component of nationalism. Yet
how much of us as individuals is sacrificed to the larger community as
we do so? Mass media embeds both complicity and acceptance in us
through signature tunes, jingles, close-down sequences and as the plat-
forms upon which key sounds and musics are placed. There was a time
when the end of a day’s broadcasting in Britain was signalled by the play-
ing of the National Anthem, just as it would be at the end of a live stage
performance. In many places around the world, it still is, although the
advent of 24-hour broadcasting makes such moments rarer. The impli-
cation of this sends a powerful message: the last word comes from the
state—or rather, the nation—and it is left to echo in the brain. We can
recall a national anthem just as we can recall a favourite popular song,
and even if we can only remember the words of the first verse, that is
sufficient to identify us with our flag. Indeed, it is the synergy between
words and music that cements it in our mind; it is sometimes hard to
recite the words of an anthem spoken, without the mental aid of the
tune to which it is sung. A national anthem does indeed relate to ‘nation’
more than to ‘state’, and the performance of it is a moment in which the
single identity is subsumed into the mass. ‘In this song, the individuals
are not called to distinguish themselves; nor, even less, are they called
to distinguish themselves as voices. Rather, they are called on to lose
themselves within it’. So writes Adriana Cavarero in her book, For More
Than One Voice. Such a performance moment creates a curious tension
between the modern idea of a ‘nationhood’—as suggested by the rights
of man depicted through various democratic statements since Magna
Carta, through the French Revolution, to the American Bill of Rights, in
which freedom of the individual has been progressively encouraged—and
a simultaneous fealty to a flag representing the nation that has ‘permit-
ted’ this. A national anthem fuses these two concepts, because the words
sung as part of it usually express the struggles and ideals through which
the nation state has journeyed and the ideals for which it stands in order
to present its citizens with the community they represent and celebrate as
they sing it. As Cavarero reminds us, ‘what counts most is not the words,
which are usually ridiculous or rhetorical, but rather the fusion of indi-
viduals in the song that symbolises their union. The song of the nation is
lifted by a people who sing in unison’ (Cavarero, 201/2).
50 S. STREET
The subliminal potency of music to enhance both personal and

communal identity was frequently demonstrated by the BBC during
the Second World War. Radio listening is often perceived as a solitary
activity, and as we have seen, can derive much of its power through
the directness of its one-to-one ‘narrowcasting’ of niche material.
Nevertheless, it has shown itself to have what we might term ‘concert-
hall’ qualities in which its audience can become aware of one another’s
listening, as well as their own, much as they would in a theatre per-
formance. Group listening changes the experience. There is often an
intensity fuelled by the peer presence of others, linked to a sharing and
at the same time an expression of personal taste. We may wish to dem-
onstrate our opinions to one another, while listening to the same mes-
sage. Nowhere is there a more eloquent example of this than in the
wartime broadcasts of the BBC’s Music While You Work, a programme
of continuous popular music broadcast twice daily, initially on the
Forces and General Forces Programme, from June 1940, and continu-
ing on the Light Programme and Home Service as late as 1967. Piped
into factories through loudspeakers, its effect was dramatic, as witness
this, albeit strongly patriotic newspaper account by Wynford Reynolds
from 1943:
I observed the tired, drawn faces, the wearied droop of shoulders, the
glances at empty seats and felt that the very air was filled with the nervous
tension of the past night. Suddenly the loud-speakers came to life – a voice
was heard “calling all workers” – and then followed the rousing strains of
a march familiar to people in this war and the last – “Colonel Bogey.” Like
a trumpet call to action, the martial melody echoed through the shop, and
then I witnessed a transformation scene – tired faces breaking into smiles,
the squaring of bent shoulders, chins uplifted, and suddenly voices, sing-
ing voices, that from a murmur swelled into a roar as with heads raised
in defiance those factory workers shouted “AND THE SAME TO YOU!”
(Baade, 60)
In creating Music While You Work, its BBC producers demonstrated

the complementary qualities of attentive and inattentive listening,
that is to say, the potential of sound to be absorbed as both a second-
ary and primary activity. There will always be, as we have discussed,
times when music and/or words meld with the background sound, but
there are others when the brain pulls the auditory into the forefront of
consciousness, and the routine task in hand becomes secondary, while

the message in the media achieves primary status. At the same time, pro-
grammes such as Music While You Work and other wartime participa-
tory show, such as the live broadcasts of ITMA and Workers Playtime,
‘from a factory somewhere in England’ blended individual experience
with communal and interactive response. Baade has written that while
a programme such as Music While you Work ‘evoked the unity required
by the war effort, it also helped listeners enact the practices of commu-
nity. Echoing music’s leisure role in dance halls, homes and sing-alongs,
MWYW foregrounded the practices of interactive, group listening in the
space of the factory, which involved formal and informal negotiations of
shared space and different tastes’ (Baade, 81).
‘Reality’
In the modern techno-mitigated environment, where mass news and
information are juxtaposed with the ubiquitous usage of social media,
we tread a fine line between too much control of shared thought, and
uncontrolled, uninformed opinion. At the same time, the freedom to
express and share an independent thought, galvanising all aspects of
an issue, is a cherished principle, and for many the essence of absolute
democracy. Whether it be in the concert hall, the theatre, the football
stadium or the political rally, the individual shares him or herself with a
(usually) chosen community to join in mutual consumption and expres-
sion. This feeds into the experience of that individual, just as the person-
ality of one person has the capacity to contribute to the mood and voice
of the group. There are points in a violent expression of public opin-
ion when individual identity becomes subsumed into the being of the
group, and a new ‘animal’ is formed with its own will and motivation.
Critical in this process, and crucial to our understanding of interaction
and personal identity, is the relationship of sound to the overall gener-
ation and control of such moments, and the motive behind its origin.
Media has been adept at exploiting the concept of ‘the voice of the peo-
ple’ over successive eras and with increasing sophistication. The idea that
a radio phone-in can be totally democratic is qualified by the understand-
ing that the selection process and policy are in fact exercised by the pro-
ducer in charge of the broadcast. The thinking behind this may indeed
be to reach a genuine and profound social truth on a subject through
52 S. STREET
the direct witness of a person with the provenance of a trusted source,

or it may equally be to fill airtime cheaply with views and voices that are
belligerent or ignorant or both, but which may in spite of/because of
this very fact, have ‘sensational’ appeal and therefore make ‘good radio’.
Opinionated reality media turns the individual who listens, in on their
own resources and judgement, while at the same time increasing the fas-
cination of the voyeur on media ‘events’ that may live in the memory for
the wrong reasons. The historian Jason Loviglio, professor of American
Studies and Director of the Certificate in Communications and Media
Studies at the University of Maryland, identifies the NBC/CBC radio
show Vox Pop, a popular radio show that went through a number of
‘man in the street’ type of formats during the 1930s and 1940s, as a sig-
nificant example of early media programming that increasingly peddled
supposed ‘reality’ in the quest for high audience ratings through compel-
ling, apparently spontaneous broadcasting. Reality shows such as talent
competitions are almost as old as electronic media itself; on the other
hand, so-called endurance shows, with or without celebrities, can rein-
vigorate the tiring profile of a public figure, while creating a personality
out of a private individual, all in the guise of tenuous social experiment.
Perhaps, as Loviglio suggests, ‘the larger cultural work of this decades-
long process has been to make way for a culture where surveillance itself
becomes the most popular and economical form of mass entertainment
and where public and private denote kinds of performance rather than
discrete places’ (Loviglio, 69).
Once we have selected the sound, words and opinions with which
we feel we can identify privately, much of what we then apply of this to
the broader world serves to seek confirmation in the signals that come
back to us. During the Second World War, British radio listeners between
1940 and 1942 regularly heard the Yorkshire accent of the novelist,
J.B. Priestley in a series of talks entitled Postscript (originally Postscript
to the News) broadcast after the nine o’clock news on Sunday evenings.
Priestley’s voice, his style and his frankly opinionated content (which
eventually proved somewhat too controversial for the BBC heads, or
so Priestley claimed when the programme was eventually taken off the
air) appealed to audiences within the context of the time as the antidote
to the somewhat pompous style and presentation of received pronun-
ciation and ‘BBC English’ in heavily scripted talks and discussions. Yet
the apparently spontaneous, intimate style was carefully constructed by
Priestley, as radio historian Hugh Chignell has explained, making these
conversations with the listener less a formal talk than a performance,

which he later refined in notes of guidance for new speakers.6 Chignell
draws attention to the artifice behind what the listener was encouraged
to believe was spontaneous ‘sharing’:
What is interesting in these few pages of notes is his awareness of the

essential artificiality of the talk, the need to pretend to be a friend to the
listener, to affect a colloquial use of language, to try to identify with the
audience, to sound relaxed and to “give the impression that he is earnestly
addressing his equal…” (Chignell, 48)
In this, Priestley demonstrated—before such ideas of communication

were more widely explored—the skill of writing for the one-to-one
broadcast. Here was a written ‘voice’, heard physically, in a cleverly con-
structed piece of textual dialogue, apparently conversational, addressing
the unseen individual listener as a friend. In so doing, ‘Priestley’s abso-
lute command of the radio talk owed a lot to his ability to find the right
register and to switch, as Churchill could, from one style or register to
another’ (Ibid.). At the same time, Priestley showed himself to possess
the skill of the spoken word poet, shaping responses through the power
of the text as well as by the means of the delivery. Here was a benchmark
for coming generations of mediators of opinion and, indeed, manipula-
tors of fact, in the ability to break through the invisible wall between ora-
tor or formal presenter in a public space, to the ‘solitary’ mass listening
audience. There, within the personal environment of the home, listen-
ing families felt themselves to be safely immured within the personally
domestic, and therefore at one and equal to this sympathetic man who
spoke clearly intelligible ideas every week in his soft north of England
burr, about things they understood. He could chat like a friend, or he
could rise to inspirational oratory, but mostly he spoke of familiar things,
and the issues that had been talked about that very day around the family
dinner table. It was, in short, persuasive.
Today, media in all its forms—from social to mass—creates challenges
for us in this respect as the provenance of ‘fact’ in a post-truth ‘infotain-
ment’ environment becomes increasingly open to personal interpreta-
tion and generates a web of virtual reality of its own creation, which may
indeed have few roots in recognisable external reality at all. It is a human
instinct to apply a principle of ‘call and response’ to our existence in the
world. We are indeed transmitters and receivers, but how we operate
54 S. STREET
this interaction, and the sources and validity of our points of reference,
becomes an issue of increasingly complexity, full of untruths, half-truths,
misconstructions, false memory and partially formed opinions purveyed
by familiar sources that may prove on closer examination to have alien
voices at their core. The sound of the self becomes in this situation like a
lone child lost in a jungle of crossed wires and interwoven signals, with
interaction sometimes at the mercy of false prophets informing the quest
for the retention of a personal identity. There is now seemingly no end
to this process, as the ‘intimate public’ as Loviglio terms it, is subjected
to diverse media exploiting the divisions and no man’s land between per-
sonal and shared speech and space, a world where ‘public and private
continue to operate as codes for unstable social identities in a society
marked by steep structural hierarchies’ (Loviglio, 132). It is a bleak con-
clusion; notwithstanding, to hear is not necessarily to listen to or accept
what alien voices would have us believe we are. The real ‘reality’ may lie
not in what we receive, but what we transmit to ourselves from within,
finding a true voice with which to counter societal misunderstanding
through personal interpretation. Poetry is, after all, a state of a listening
and interpretative mind as much as it is words on paper or on the air, and
it is formed not by committee but by the individual.
Notes
1. ‘Cogito ergo sum’, the Latin proposition by René Descarte, usually trans-
lated into English as ‘I think, therefore I am’, which originally appeared in
French as ‘je pense, donc je suis’ in his Discourse on the Method, and later in
his Principles of Philosophy.
2. Black, Colin. Blog entry: http://colin-black.weebly.com/sound-blog/
just-remembering-how-melbourne-sounds-different-to-sydney-how-each-
city-has-it-own-sound-signature. (accessed 15/1/2017).
3. Burnett, Dean, ‘Does Music Really Help You Concentrate?’ The Guardian,
20 August, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/
aug/20/does-music-really-help-you-concentrate?CMP=share_btn_tw
(accessed 10/10/2016).
4. Witek MAG, Clarke EF, Wallentin M, Kringelbach ML, Vuust P (2014)
Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music. PLoS
ONE 9(4): e94446. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094446 (accessed
10/10/2016).
5. McCormick, Neil, ‘100 Greatest Songs of All Time’, Daily Telegraph, 2

April 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/11621427/best-
songs-of-all-time.html (accessed 11/10/2016).
6. Priestley, J. B., Hints for Broadcast Speakers, undated, BBC Written
Archives Centre: Priestley, Talks Policy, File 1A.S, cited by Chignell,
Hugh, in Public Issue Radio. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.
CHAPTER 4
Invasion of the Sound Aliens
Abstract  The world around us is shaped and governed by sonic signals

and messages beyond our control, audio environments that may—or may
not be—irrelevant to our sense of self. These may come from sources
such as industrial landscapes, unwonted street noise, warfare, human suf-
fering and the penetration of sound propaganda. For example, the mem-
ory of a short wave call signal from a cold war radio station, or externally
originated sound such as piped music and in-store noise, announcements
and ambient atmospheres create a subliminal ‘soup’ through which we
wade, while selecting or rejecting specific signals as required, and seek-
ing to preserve a personal identity within a homogenised created/manu-
factured world of retail, travel and utility. For good or ill, we may close
our eyes, but while we may not be able to close our ears, the brain can
‘tune out’ or respond: that is our choice. In other words, hearing is com-
pulsory in normal circumstances, but listening is a conscious decision, a
major factor in the determination of the self.
Keywords  Unwanted noise · Natural sounds · Muzak

Political sound · Aggression

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58676-2_4
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Listening for a Reason

‘Civilisation’, writes the philosopher Mladen Dolar, ‘announces its pro-
gress by a lot of noise, and the more it progresses, the noisier it gets’
(Dolar, 13). Inner silence, the silence of being at peace and in a trans-
cendent sense, in a creative space that is truly open to all possibilities, is
a quality that is constantly at threat through interaction with the world.
This is as it should be. In Susan Sontag’s words, ‘“Silence” never ceases
to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence; just as there can’t be
“up” without “down” or “left” without “right,” so one must acknowl-
edge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recog-
nise silence’ (Sontag, 11).
Whenever we open a window or an external door, we break a seal
on the barrier between internal sound—be it domestic or otherwise—
and the world outside. If we are fully sighted and with hearing intact,
we experience a blend of impressions, often led by the visual. We take in
huge amounts of information at a glance: the weather, traffic, other peo-
ple, light, dark, time of year and so on. It is part of a survival system that
goes back to our birth as a species. We are deep-wired to assess our envi-
ronment for danger, risk and possibility. Listening is a part of this ancient
inbuilt scanning system, but the nature of the ear’s relationship to the
brain means it has to be tuned, or calibrated. Opening the external door
or the window with closed eyes can be instructive; we find in ourselves
an aural awareness that was previously masked by the dominance of the
eye’s impressions. There is a whole sound world rushing by, amorphous,
a mix of noises coalescing into one murmur or roar, depending on our
location. The weather plays a major part in this; for example, rain defines
the contours of our immediate environment, plays the percussion of its
surfaces, gives its otherwise silent inanimate shapes a sound. Wind gives
us trees, but this can be ambiguous; the rushing of leaves may sound like
water, a torrential downpour, so our brain computes what it hears and
comes to a conclusion. John Hull, losing his eyesight at the height of an
academic career, noted the value of weather in this way, giving as it did,
a sense of shape and perspective to his surroundings. In fact, going fur-
ther, he found himself wishing that ‘if only rain could fall inside a room,
it would help me to understand where things are in that room, to give a
sense of being in the room, instead of just sitting on a chair’ (Hull, 27).
Occasionally one sonic event, either through volume or frequency,
waves at us, demands our attention, but it does so through a bed of
4 INVASION OF THE SOUND ALIENS 59
seemingly opaque audio formed of almost infinite components, some

huge and many tiny. The swish of a bicycle passing us on a wet road
may seem to be virtually lost in the general hubbub, but it, in its way,
is also contributing to the soundscape, a small ingredient in the general
mix of sound that surrounds us, whether we like it or not, and through
which we must negotiate our own sonic selves, taking from it or reject-
ing according to our needs and emotions.
Sounds that we do not recognise alert us to potential danger. For
example, awoken in the night by screaming outside, we lie, disorientated,
trying to make sense of what we are hearing, fearful, apprehensive, con-
sidering if we need to take action. We are flung out of unconsciousness
by something we have no reference for, something that invades us before
our sensory defences have had time to muster. A moment’s considera-
tion, a glance through the window, a second hearing, and the sound may
be identified. Action may or may not be required on our part, the mys-
tery is resolved, and the sound is no longer uncanny. We may not have
control over the source, but at least our mind has control of the reason
for the disturbance. Until this happens, we are children again, without
the comfort of explanation, alone with fear and a threat, returned to an
ancient state of existence in which we are subject to forces beyond our
control. In Freud’s words:
It appears that we have all, in the course of our individual development,

been through a phase corresponding to the animistic phase in the devel-
opment of primitive peoples, that this phase did not pass without leaving
behind in us residual traces that can still make themselves felt, and that
everything we now find “uncanny” meets the criterion that is linked with
these remnants of animistic mental activity and prompts them to express
themselves. (Freud, 147)
When a complex mix of sounds invades our consciousness, the mind tries
to make sense of firstly the whole, then the composite elements of which
the whole is comprised, seeking to elicit information about risk and dan-
ger or help and support contained therein, as in, for example, a soldier’s
response to the chaotic sounds of a battlefield, made up of individual
components, heard at differing distances and perspectives. At the start of
Listening to the Wind, Tim Robinson’s remarkable trilogy, Connemara,
the author describes this in terms of a storm; it is not, after all, only man-
made sounds, cityscapes and so on that engulf our ears. The elements,
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clearly, have the same effect, at times to the point of disorientation and
bewilderment. Robinson articulates the experience eloquently, the com-
plex breaking down of individual sounds, and the difficulty in extracting
them from cacophony:
Going here and there in thought through the pandemonium only the
most analytic listening can disengage its elements: shriek of sedge bent
double out on the heath, grinding of shingle sucked back by the reflux,
slow chamfering of a stone’s edge blown by sand grains. (Robinson, 2)
What Robinson is describing is something vital, dynamic and ongoing:

the shaping of landscape through various natural instruments, hidden
to all but the most attentive ear by the huge engine that drives them.
Noise is many things. Douglas Kahn understands it in one sense to be
‘that constant grating generated by the movement between the abstract
and empirical’ (Kahn, 24). Hillel Schwarz speaks of the historical view
of ‘the expanding notion of sounds bitten off one from another or gone
astray—uprooted, wildly multiplied, truncated, distended, isolated, and
unintelligible—that contributed to the likelihood of coming everywhere
upon noise’ (Schwarz, 69). For the human ear to identify the sounds
that surround it and that force themselves, unbidden, into the brain, is
to seek some sort of understanding and therefore control. The noise of
the ‘now’ of environment can be a metaphor for our emotions and our
state of mind. What Robinson describes as ‘fluid generalities impacting
on intricate concrete particulars’ building part by part to form an opaque
audio fog through which we stumble, are important to understand and
to separate, one from another; yet how much do we create within our-
selves the climate to do so?
As the wave or wind breaks around the headland, a wood, a boulder, a tree
trunk, a pebble, a twig, a wisp of seaweed or a microscopic hair on a leaf,
the streamlines are split apart, flung against each other, compressed in nar-
rows, knotted in vortices. The ear constructs another wholeness out of the
reiterated fragmentation of pitches, and it can be terrible, this wide range
of frequencies coalescing into something approaching the auditory chaos
and incoherence that sound engineers call white noise: zero of informa-
tion-content, random interference obliterating all messages…a metaphysi-
cal horror made audible. (Robinson, 2)
Coping with the natural world may sometimes be terrifying. Yet beyond
that there is the world we have created for ourselves, a sometimes haphaz-
ard set of structures that have gradually grown into communities around
us. We are, as David Mortensen reminded us, ‘adrift in a torrent of activity
that constantly fashions (our) every habit and thought’. This bombardment
of the senses puts the identity of individual at risk as the ‘self-contained,
autonomous entity operating within a well-boundaried self’. As we move
through our life and our immediate world, we are forever at the centre
of, in Mortensen’s words, ‘an uninterrupted flood of physical and social
influences. The impingement of energy on the senses is, like the air we
breathe, an atmosphere so persuasive that few are aware of its constancy
or effects’ (Mortensen, 69). Indeed, so pervasive that we may not fully
appreciate the risk of imbalance of cause and effect in some sounds and
their relationship to our inner selves. The condition known as misophonia,
for example, is defined by an excessive adverse reaction to certain—often
everyday—sounds, such as hearing someone drinking, or eating potato
crisps. For some, this can be intolerable, triggering extreme anger or dis-
tress. It may be that this condition, which originates in the anterior insular
cortex—the part of the brain that connects the senses to the emotions—
could be key to our understanding of our audio personality, and how our
sonic responses are formed. The brain is a delicate computer; when it
is working in perfect balance, its readings of the world around us tell us
who we are in relationship to that world. It is when that balance shifts and
goes out of kilter that our reactions become extreme and misrepresent us.
In other words, we need every minute part of our internal wiring to make
sense of things, but when the fine-tuning is disturbed, the aliens are inside
us rather than, as it may seem, attacking us from without.
As young children, we play with the imagination; we create friends
out of the air, sometimes out of the inanimate; we talk to them, and
they form a part of the new world around us. It is part of the weather
of childhood. Later, the failure to differentiate realities may manifest in
mental storms for which Robinson’s physical gales or Mortensen’s social
tensions may be seen to be a metaphor. Constantly, whether awake in a
state of reflection, or asleep and dreaming, ‘the nervous system strives
to fulfil the conditions necessary for man to make sense of his unfolding
experience’ (Ibid.). It is not uncommon for us to silently discuss our sit-
uation with ourselves; it is how we make sense of who and where we are.
It is when the voices in our heads become more tangible, that these reali-
ties become blurred and the disorientation of various consciousnesses
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brushing against one another takes us to mysterious places. Proust, in the

defining ‘Madeleine’ sequence from an early section of In Search of Lost
Time speaks of this shadowy world:
What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself;

when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it
must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek?
More than that: create. It is face to face with something that does not yet
exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the
light of day. (Proust, Part 1, 52)
Gaining—and retaining—control and access to memory and other com-

partments of the self may be dependent on any one of a number of
factors; for Proust, taste and smell are the keys, but equally, the sonic
holds great unlocking powers. A small, involuntary sound may trigger an
answering voice. In mental illness, however, voices may come out of this
darkness with a sense of reality that can seduce us, and as Christopher
Bollas has written, ‘the proximity, the sound and character of the voices,
whether they are single or multiple—all these aspects create the strange
situation of being witness to the self’s own mental life’ (Bollas, 107).
Seekers after the defining sound of self beware; there are false gods lurk-
ing in the dusk of the mind that may seem persuasive. Bollas, in his study
of schizophrenia, notes how a person may split ‘into different temporal
selves (infant, child, adolescent, adult)’ (ibid., 108). The self I was as a
child and the self I am today may be linked by a chain of time, the frag-
ile connection Proust seeks to hold on to, but fragile too is the men-
tal state with which we navigate ourselves. This ‘I’ may conceal itself,
‘may be projected for safekeeping into stand-ins or proxies in order to
fool anyone who might be trying to find it and destroy it. So a schiz-
ophrenic might lodge his true self in a tree, a rock, or a brook. When
these speak to him, he is speaking to himself in their voices. The fact that
they are safeguarding this true self explains why he reveres them, for they
know he is in trouble and their instructions are attempts at helping him’
(ibid., 104). Taken literally, the word ‘schizophrenia’ means ‘fragmented
mind’; thus, a single personality breaks up into disconnected unit, and
these may manifest as sound. Other forms of mental condition, such as
autism, may also create multiple signals, like many radio stations playing
at the same time. Additionally, ‘split personality’, sometimes confused
with Schizophrenia, and also known as dissociative identity disorder, can
produce a condition in which two or more distinct identities may exist

within the same person. As the neurologist, Rachel E. Gur writes:
These identities take turns controlling the person’s behaviour. Each iden-
tity may have its own name, personality traits and self-image. Some identi-
ties may remember what others did, which can lead to large, unexplained
gaps in the person’s memory. dissociative identity disorder is not a form of
schizophrenia, but rather a separate disorder with an entirely different set
of causes, symptoms and treatments. (Gur in Snyder, 9)
Who is it that speaks or sings, and who is it that listens? Personal identity
can be kaleidoscopic, and the music of the self may be more the sonic
equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting than a minimalist line drawing.
Balancing our personal sound worlds requires consummate human engi-
neering; mentally and physically, it is chillingly easy for our equalisation
to go awry. In Wordsworth’s words:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune…
Some things are simpler to re-calibrate than others. During the writ-
ing of this book, I became aware that my own hearing was declining; age
and a lifetime of sound practice and study had taken their toll, and tests
showed that I now needed to be fitted with a hearing aid. It is curious
that for many of us, the idea that our hearing needs support can prove
to be a challenging one. The same person who accepts the need for spec-
tacles, and even rejoices in their design as a fashion accessory, might
baulk at a new reliance of an artificial boost to hearing. I was aware of
this psychological trait in myself; partly, perhaps, it is to do with what it
acknowledges in our journey, partly, it must be said, vanity. Whatever the
64 S. STREET
barriers, the required acknowledgement is that suddenly things are not

as they were, they will never be the same again, and however sophisti-
cated, this new addition to our daily routine still represents something
we would sooner not admit, namely that we are losing ourselves to time.
That said, and basic as it was, for me the arrival of the new device came
initially as a welcome and revelatory event. Switching it on for the first
time, I instantly became aware of what I had gradually been losing. And
this is key: it was a gradual process, to the extent that I had not realised
how much the tide of the world’s sound had been ebbing away from
me over a long and continuous period of time. Suddenly, there were
the high frequencies again: insects, birdsong, nuances of daily life that I
had learned to live without and yet, now they were back, I realised how
much I had missed. Suffering for years from tinnitus, the mind grows
used to its presence, but now, although it was still there, the return of
lost sounds, amplified, came through its gauze wall, and I could hear
beyond it. I felt immediately in the world in a quite intoxicating way;
there, once more, was the huge presence of my immediate surrounding
environment, and my sense of being physically a part of it in a way I
had either forgotten or not expected. I was no longer merely a visual
observer. I was a participant.
Once I recovered from the excitement and exhilaration of this discov-
ery, I became quickly aware of less welcome sound arrivals. My hearing
aid was not state of the art, and most importantly, it couldn’t think. It
amplified everything, indiscriminately. Traffic noise on a wet road was
at first almost intolerable, removing shopping from a carrier bag turned
rustling plastic into something akin to breaking glass, and certain fre-
quencies of voice and accent, a high-pitched laugh in a restaurant or a
certain note in a song, the treble elements of television sound, all these
were unbearable, and I learned very quickly that my new companion
and support was only a friend in certain situations. Things that had been
part of everyday life seemed all of a sudden to be strange and alien and
aggressive. Adjustments were made, and my aural relationship with the
world resumed a more balanced state. Nevertheless, it was an interest-
ing and salutary experience; however sophisticated may be the artificial
support systems we create for ourselves, they cannot completely replicate
the natural cog in the machine with which world and mind interrelate.
Selection is crucial; our brain filters what it does not need and focuses
of what it finds desirable. It is only when choice is removed that the
sonic world’s sharing of itself becomes invasion. As John Cage wrote,
‘wherever we are, what we hear is noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs

us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating’ (Cage, 3).1
Natural—and Unnatural—Selection
There is an important issue here; we are by origin, creatures of the natu-
ral world, and our genes evolved to equip us to respond to that world,
either as hunter-gatherers or as survivors. In the modern world, western
society inhabits for the most part, an artificial sound environment; the
word ‘artificial’ might here be seen to mean human, but there is a dis-
tinction to be made between man-made and ‘human’. In fact, while we
might think that the noise of our urban surroundings is that of human-
ity, in point of fact it can have the effect of removing us from our human
roots. We can become desensitised, lacking mental space for reflective
thinking. When noise becomes an intrusion, it can cover perception like
a blanket, dulling our senses, creating confusion and causing errors of
judgement and flaws in decision-making. We might regret the neces-
sity of the hearing aid, but the uncomfortable truth may be that we are
losing our hearing, along with our other senses, already in subtler ways.
That is to say, the brain’s filter is making adjustments on our behalf in
order to preserve our personal self, at the expense of detailed ‘fine-tun-
ing’. Gradually the ‘will’ of the environment obliterates aspects of the
personality, adjusting us in spite of ourselves to our role in the machine’s
greater purpose. Some might say that this is enabling us to conform to
the ‘real’ world, which is ironic, in that, as we have seen, the so-called
real is frequently actually fabricated. Everywhere we are compromised;
stores, restaurants and clubs play continuous unwanted music, while
hard floor and wall surfaces reflect sound, resulting in us raising our own
voices to compensate. We shout at one another from a foot or so away
to make ourselves heard; this in turn has the effect of lifting the sound
levels still further, and we enter a truly vicious circle of Babel. We must
learn to lip read to enable some form of conversation, or simply give up
and go home with a sore throat and numbed hearing.
On the other hand, it is true to say that because we are adaptable,
there are times when we welcome the hubbub of gregariousness; for
example, a writer emerging out of silent solitude into the conviviality of
a bar might enjoy being a part of the throng, particularly as a passive
observer. Douglas Kahn has developed this idea:
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When one’s own speech is not implicated, the noise returns to more peace-
able settings…The speech of the raucousness of cafés and other such
haunts produces in itself a figure of the social where poets and writers in
midst of the craft need not feel so alone. The dish and din can provide
a peaceful home for the overriding conflict within the very act of writ-
ing – the gregarious motive of communication versus the solitude of its
execution – by providing a chatty noise within which a collectively dis-
cursive interlocutor can be divined, a nascent public imagined. Café noise
also models the supple field of exchange between inner speech-sounds and
those of the world and, thus, situates the writer. (Kahn, 42)
This sense does not belong exclusively to the artist; any one of us is capa-
ble of enjoying the noise bustle of a busy environment when we feel we
have some control over our role in the situation. There are times when
we actively seek noise, explore the need for noise as a relief, a release,
rebellion or protest, as well as for enjoyment, say at a rock concert or
other social event. We even use the phrase, ‘make some noise’ as a term
of celebration or appreciation. Schwarz has added a further proviso in
pointing to the fact the ‘distinctions between sound and noise, or noise
and music, or music and sound, can only be provisional—not because
they are matters of taste but because…[of] how the acoustics are staged,
in auditoria or bedrooms, in laboratories or courtrooms’ (Schwarz, 858).
It may be added here that the office environment today is largely a much
quieter one than the cacophony of typewriters that would have identified
it some generations ago. It is when we step out into the sound world,
away from such controlled spaces, that the issues arise. In truth, it is
when we cease to be consciously aware of our sonic surroundings and
therefore neglect to control them, that the raising of volumes and the
effects of frequencies do the most damage, both physically and mentally.
Just because we volunteer to be within a sound environment, does not
mean it is good for us. Music could be said to be organised noise; we
develop habits and come to expect the soundscape of the world, organ-
ised or not—and sound has the capacity to shatter glass and undermine
stone, according to frequency.
Neither does it end there; most vehicles are not insulated appropri-
ately for sound, so as we listen to in-car entertainment, we find our-
selves turning the volume up to compensate for engine and road noise.
Arriving home, we close the door on this mayhem, often finding sonic
security from attack behind double-glazed windows, which may—or may
not—protect us from the sound of the traffic outside, or—if we happen

to be on an airport flight path—the aural detritus of our modern skies.
None of this did we sign up for as members of the human species. Come
the morning, the same glass that enabled us to sleep in relative peace
itself prevents awareness of the awakening natural world: birdsong, the
elements and the stirrings of nature, but we have countered that by cre-
ating alarms to summon us back to the party, clock-radios, buzzers, bells
and timer-switches igniting the means of admitting the jostling media
into our beings…and so it continues. As we travel to and from work, as
we occupy our offices and other environments of employment, we often
find ourselves moving through visually sophisticated—event stunning—
cityscapes, but how much consideration do our employers, architects and
town planners give to the sound of the buildings we inhabit, not to men-
tion their high street juxtapositioning that often creates vortices of noise
pollution?
It is little wonder that sound and silence have become increasingly
preoccupations in our thinking; a number of film-makers have addressed
the issue, among them Philip Gröning (Into Great Silence, 2006), Pat
Collins (Silence, 2012) and Patrick Shen (In Pursuit of Silence, 2016).
Shen himself has commented on the paradox of the sound employed in
making a work about silence, not least the silent sound of reading and
planning discussed earlier in this book. As he has written, sound frames
silence and throws it into relief:
I began to appreciate the idea that these spaces in between would not exist
without the interruptions of sound perforating the silence. And I won-
dered if we’d even know where to look for silence without those inter-
ruptions. What I began to discover was that silence and speech were
inextricably tied to one another, and that silence, far from being what we
in the West would define as the “absence of sound”, is also inextricably
tied to our experience of the world.2
We shall return to the matter of voice and speech in a later chapter. In

the meantime, another irony confronting audiences to Shen’s film would
seem to be the fact that in order to interrogate silence, the director is
required to spend considerable time during the film examining the kind
of negative, alien sound we have so far discussed here. It is also clear that
this kind of assault on the senses is by no means new. The poet Edward
Thomas, writing before the First World War, at a time of crossover in
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public mobility when horse-drawn city traffic was vying with the newly
arrived internal combustion engine for dominance over the aural senses,
was painfully (almost literally) aware of the cacophonous assault on the
mind and drew attention to it in his book, Oxford. Here, he refers to the
noise of London, ‘with its roar of causes that have been won’ (Thomas, 3).
Elsewhere in his writing, London shouts again, when he recalls the city’s
‘roar [that] continued of the inhuman masses of humanity, amidst which
a child’s crying for a toy was an impertinence, a terrible petty interrup-
tion of the violent moving swoon’ (Thomas, 26). There, through a few
words taken from his 1913 work, In Pursuit of Spring, Thomas sums up
from over one hundred years ago, the urban crisis that today continues
unresolved in our lives, and to which we daily employ pragmatic solu-
tions within ourselves. It is the non-human sound initiated by human
agency that makes its vexation to the spirit even more painful.
The idea that by closing a door on the world, we can exclude it is of
course an illusion. The dynamic of life is addictive, and while we may
find our stress levels decrease within the relative calm of a home environ-
ment, it is not long before we voluntarily opt back into the stream of col-
lective consciousness through our media receivers. We long for news; we
may hate it when we hear it, be repulsed, worried, disgusted, frightened,
angered or saddened, but when we do not know how the world is, we
fear for it and ourselves. As we grow older, our immediate surroundings
matter more; the inherent threat of a sound we cannot identify can cause
paranoia as we have seen, and radio, television and other media connect
us to wider concerns, which, because often we can do little about them,
cause us angst and frustration. Yet we need to be informed. Knowledge
may be power, but information may be survival. Thus, in his short poem,
‘To My Little Radio’, while Bertolt Brecht feared the message, he treas-
ured the messenger:
You little box I carried on that trip

Concerned to save your works from getting broken
Fleeing from house to train, from train to ship
So I might hear the hated jargon spoken.
Beside my bedside and to give me pain
Last thing at night, once more as dawn appears
Shouting their victories and my worst fears:

Promise at least you won’t go dead again! (Street, 46)
In Nazi Germany, the cheap and ubiquitous Volksempfänger or

‘People’s Radio’, commissioned by Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels and developed by Otto Griessing flooded the market between
1933 and the outbreak of war, in various models. Hitler’s government
understood the power of propaganda and devised a receiver to pro-
vide wide access to the Party message, while being too low powered to
receive international broadcasts clearly. This attempt at control became
more sinister with the outbreak of war, when listening to foreign sta-
tions became a criminal offence; penalties ranged from fines and con-
fiscation of radios to imprisonment. As the war progressed, sentencing
became more extreme, including banishment to a concentration camp
or even death. Previously, Germany had been a pioneer of international
broadcasting from as early as 1926, aiming signals in particular at North
America. These tests were increased in 1929, and the power of short-
wave transmissions to cover great distances was quickly understood, and
in April 1933 a station was officially opened, broadcasting in German
and English. By the end of 1940, the ‘North American Zone’ as it was
officially known was broadcasting every evening, with the addition of
French broadcasts aimed at Canada. The style of the programming was
relaxed and produced to appeal to an American audience: ‘The announc-
ers adopted a friendly style that contrasted sharply with the tone of the
Nazis’ home transmissions. An American survey in the early 1940s put
the daily US audience of North American transmissions at 140,000′
(Tidy, 154). The urbane tone was very different to the sinister verbal
assaults on Britain by William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) or the acerbic
sarcasm of Ezra Pound’s talks from fascist Italy, who in December 1941
was opening transmissions with insults delivered in a home-spun middle
American style:
Europe callin’, Pound speakin’. Ezry Pound speakin’. And I think I’m still
speakin’ a bit more TO England than to the United States of America but
you folks may as well hear it. They say an Englishman’s head’s made of
wood and the American head made of watermelon. Easier to git something
INTO the American head, but nigh impossible to make it stick there for
ten minutes. (Doob, 20)
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We can switch the radio or television off at will, and yet sound has
the power to hypnotise us into listening to what we abhor. As early as
November 1939, a BBC survey showed that 50% of UK citizens lis-
tening to foreign stations tuned into William Joyce’s broadcasts from
Hamburg, a figure representing 27% of the population (Street, 191). As
the war progressed, fascination grew in the content of Joyce’s broadcasts,
not least due to the uncanny accuracy of the information he communi-
cated. It was as if at times he was looking over the listeners’ shoulders.
As James Wood has written, ‘information is seldom neutral, especially
that which has a social or political import…Nevertheless for it to receive
an audience, news has at all times to be credible’ (Wood, 23). Radio is
a one-to-one medium, and the one who listens is receptive to either a
plausible new ‘truth’, or to a statement that reinforces their own sense
of themselves. Some aspects of personal identity are acquired voluntarily,
while others creep under our guard subliminally through sources we may
or may not trust, but which have the ability to reach us, left-field wher-
ever we may be. Even the word ‘propaganda’ is open to interpretation,
just as extreme words such as ‘freedom-fighter’ and ‘terrorist’ may be
interchangeable, depending on a point of view, as became clear to media
observers in 1940:
In the Houses of Parliament some MPs demanded that German propa-

ganda broadcasting to England should be answered with “truth” from
the BBC in London. But at about the same time in Berlin, Dr. Joseph
Goebbels…was admonishing a Berlin news agency for saying that the BBC
was broadcasting propaganda to the German people. “That is untrue,”
Goebbels said, adding “the word propaganda must only be used to
describe German broadcasts. The BBC is not broadcasting propaganda, it
is broadcasting lies.” (ibid., 24)
It is startling for anyone who considers the very word ‘propaganda’ to

be pejorative, to reach an understanding that it could be seen in such a
positive light, and yet every time a news broadcaster undertakes to speak
on behalf of a vested interest, however worthy, it is seeking to affect indi-
vidual thinking through a new or applied point of view. We are aware
every time we listen to a news bulletin, made up perhaps of five or six
stories, that there is more going on in the world than this 2-or 5-min
transmission can give us; we must therefore also be aware that the deci-
sion to provide this digest is an editorial one, that a mind or minds have
been at work, deciding what we should know at this particular time. We

may reject what we hear or see, but we as individuals are subtly changed
by the process of consuming the message, either through knowledge,
enlightenment or confirmed prejudice. Certainly a so-called free society,
one in which democratic values are seen to be observed, would believe
itself to be beyond the reach of some of the more extreme forms of gov-
ernance such as dictatorships and totalitarianism. Yet the voice of vested
interests can be insidious; the freedom of the press is a hallowed right in
the free world, but that press is subject to ownership, and those own-
ers have interests and are themselves subject to influence, conflicts can
arise between governments and media over the very nature of ‘truth’. In
a military or totalitarian state, control of public expression may be main-
tained by the threat of force, whereas in a so-called free state, the sup-
pression of a communal voice is achieved by what the radical American
philosopher, linguistic scholar and activist, Noam Chomsky called ‘man-
ufacture of consent’, a point of view propounding indoctrination not as
inconsistent with democracy but rather, as its essence. A curious, sophisti-
cated and informed public voice is, Chomsky argues, not in the interests
of civil rule, and so control of what people think is required. Viewing
this process in countries and states which we would view as alien to
democratic principles, we would name this control as ‘propaganda’. At
the same time, social media has become ubiquitous, and it is now pos-
sible for a ruling body, be it a group or an individual, to issue statements
through Twitter in 140 characters that bypass media editorials and con-
nect directly with a populace, unchallenged and unqualified. At the same
time, every free private individual has the same access; the battle for a
dominant (and to the public ear) plausible voice is as crucial and complex
as it has ever been. The danger is that divisions are widened, extremist
positions become entrenched, and between the arguments, marginalised
areas of society may find themselves without an effective representative
voice, while other louder, radical oppositional sections of the populace
become mobilised. In the midst of this, integrity and honesty in jour-
nalism are of greater importance than ever, as the listening, viewing and
reading audience become increasingly fragmented, multicultural and car-
rying with its views and ideas from multiple backgrounds and agenda.
Even within more general populist entertainment, away from the
controversies of news, politics and current affairs, a single country’s
population contains communities for whom mainstream media cre-
ates entertainment, information and music which may well be largely
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inappropriate. While such media may seem—indeed in many cases

intend—to communicate benign messages, the effect can be of aliena-
tion. The considerations of ethnography are subtle, but the nature of the
voice—both of the maker and of the audience—can be fundamental to
a sense of belonging, sharing and participating in society. While William
Joyce, threatening British cities with a seemingly omniscient eye could
command huge audiences, his alien voice kept people listening because,
like it or not, what he had to say concerned them, and was delivered to
a very different country, ethnographically, to the Britain of the twenty-
first century. Today, a national broadcaster seeking to reach a socially
deprived young person within an inner-city ethnic minority finds that it
may not be the content of the message that does not reach home, but
the voice, the tone in which it is delivered. Walter Benjamin, writing at
the beginning of the 1930s, when radio was still relatively new, expressed
it thus: ‘Never has a reader snapped shut a book he has just begun as
wilfully as listeners switch off the radio after the first minute of some lec-
tures. It is not the remoteness of the subject matter; this would often
be a reason to listen for a while, uncommitted. It is the voice, the dic-
tion, the language…just as in a few cases it can captivate the listener with
the most remote material. (There are speakers one listens to even for the
weather report.)’ (Benjamin, 363–4) For good or ill, the actual sound
of sense (to borrow from Robert Frost) is sometimes as powerful as the
sense itself. Radio speaks to one person. It is intimate. Were I to be ver-
bally attacked by another individual, I would seek ways of defending my
position, or of questioning theirs. Denied such an option, I would seek
ways of ending the confrontation as quickly as possible. If, on the other
hand, the voice that put these contrary views to me was a friendly one, a
voice that reflected a personality I felt I could trust, I might at least lis-
ten more sympathetically, after which, hopefully I would be able put my
point of view, and be heard. The structure of mass media has for many
years given the broadcast voice the advantage in any form of discussion.
It points at issues rather than beckons to its audience. Certainly the ubiq-
uitous phone-in programme provides the audience with an opportu-
nity to air views, but the control—and the last word—remains with the
broadcaster. Participatory radio in the truest sense can only be created at
community level.
The history of this hugely important but underfunded form of
broadcasting has always been a fraught one in the UK. Its early failure
to establish itself in the first place during the 1970s and 1980s led to
what Tony Stoller has called ‘the fudged compromise’ of Independent

Local Radio which nonetheless had ‘genuine local and demotic creden-
tials’ (Stoller, 155). This was dissipated and ultimately virtually erased
with the coming of commercial radio during the political era of Margaret
Thatcher, which, by very virtue of its lack of local identity created an
‘unexpected space for a third tier of not-for-profit radio’ (Ibid.). Thus,
a possibility was established for truly participatory radio as a voice for
individuals and for the communities these individuals comprised. In this,
Britain lagged behind some other countries, as Stoller points out: ‘In the
USA, where the whole raft of non-established radio stations—student,
campus, community—is mostly found on the lower frequencies, they
have been celebrated collectively as being “left of the dial”’ (Ibid.). In
the end, the establishment of such stations comes from the communi-
ty’s need for collective self-expression, for talking with its people, rather
than from a bureaucratic or commercial imperative. Such initiatives are
capable of providing not only locally friendly rather than culturally alien
audio, but often vernacular poetic language of profound beauty and sig-
nificance, born of the understanding and security of mutuality.
We shall explore the crucial place of voice—both individually and in
a sociopolitical sense—later in this book. For now, let us simply note
that societal conventions of acceptability create a hierarchy in which
an accent or a dialect may provide a tacit entrance to a social ‘club’—
whether that be a club of class, culture, geography or race—or exclu-
sion. The sound aliens who attack your sense of citizenship in the world
may be sitting next to you right now, and they exert their influence as
they impose their presence, sometimes without even realising it, by the
way they speak. Environment is everything here, and sound seems to
welcome some, while it repels others. The theatrical voice coach, Patsy
Rodenburg, spending time in the foyers of London’s Barbican or Royal
National Theatre has noted ‘the same upper class voices boring into
your head. They sound demanding, belittling and frankly self-impor-
tant…To me these “cultivated” voices are saying one thing: “the right
to speak is mine and mine alone.”…In our society they have hegemony
over the sound of us all’ (Rodenburg 1, 6). This is a strong statement
of the power of human sound to become alien and domineering, part
of a power struggle in which acceptance or suspicion between strangers
is formed by a voice, an accent or a dialect that is in some sense alien.
Dialect is language as physical sound, and we judge it as native or foreign
to us as we negotiate our lives. Faced with an alien invasion of sound in
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whatever form, we may respond with sound of our own, or fall silent.
There is, it must be said, a defensive propensity within human beings to
auditory prejudice; a voice, a dialect or a foreign accent may alert us to
a supposed risk to ourselves as an individual when none exists. Next to
physical appearance—the colour of skin, age, gender and other visible
attributes—nothing activates the snap judgement in us so much and so
quickly as the sound, timbre, pitch and ethnicity of the voice.
There are members of modern societies for whom the strangeness and
inappropriateness of communications from another media place, cultur-
ally and ethnically puts them spiritually in the situation of a foreigner in
their own land. Given the opportunity of sharing what they possess, even
if it is doubt and fear, and the possibility that their communal voice is at
least being heard, is a step towards the breakdown of walls. The alterna-
tive will be discussed in the next chapter. We have discussed silence as
a positive thing already in this book. We will turn now to its negative
aspect. If sound is communication, what happens when the transmitters
switch off? As Bertolt Brecht wrote, ‘a man who has something to say
and finds no one to listen is in a bad way. Worse off are the listeners who
can find no one with something to say to them’ (Brecht, 38).
Notes
1. This should be qualified with respect to the word ‘fascinating’. Our sur-
vival system is designed to protect us. Thus, we may listen to some noise
that attracts our attention and which we identify as threatening, repellent
or dangerous. Cage’s point nevertheless stands: in order to identify the
sound, our brains must first engage with it and make it specific.
2. Shen, Patrick, written introduction to In Pursuit of Silence, delivered as an
audience handout.
CHAPTER 5
Uncomfortably Numb: Alone

in the Sound World
Abstract  Like many species, we are creatures of call and response.

Reverberations and echoes govern us, and we listen for other voices to
place us in the world. We become disorientated when we are left with
only our internal sound world, without the surrounding soundtrack of
an external context. This may be through physical or mental illness, or
it may be through existing in a culturally alien environment, a regime
antagonistic to us personally, politically or socially. Sound art is powerful
in the use of metaphor to depict this alienation, but the reality of a lost
creature calling in vain for a member of its own species tells us that isola-
tion is heightened by the lack of an answer, whatever or whoever we may
be. The suggestion of searching for a reassuring voice through religion
or interplanetary research is clear. The loneliest place on earth—be it lit-
erally or metaphorically—is an anechoic chamber.
Keywords  Internal Silence · Muteness · Alienation · Marginalised

Groups · Health Issues
Inside a Silent Cage

Just as there is positive and negative sound, so there are silences which
alienate us. Silence may be a spiritual state, something to seek as a means
to enlightenment, but it may equally be a denial of our rights as humans,
a malevolent and actively damaging force in which affirmation and

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58676-2_5
76 S. STREET
confirmation of ourselves are removed. The loneliest place can be in the

midst of a crowd, surrounded by the noise and laughter of a party or
other form of celebration, where the vibrancy of the environment throws
into relief the inner silence of a self without the means or points of refer-
ence for communication. In 2009, the Belgian writer Tom Lanoye wrote
a book called Speechless, about his mother Josée, an actress, who had had
a severe stroke and lost the ability to speak as a result. Josée deteriorated
over two years, deprived of the capacity for speech, and Lanoye’s book is
a moving account of her life, providing on her behalf, a means of expres-
sion through language once again. At the very start of Speechless, he
writes: ‘Everyone who knew her had always expected that things would
turn out differently. That her heart, fragile and wonky as she had always
described it herself, would not wait two years. It would stop beating as
soon as that mouth of hers could no longer speak’ (Lanoye, 13). To be
forced into silence by circumstance is to be robbed of a right; it is little
wonder that the victims of huge strokes cry with frustration. Sadly, this is
a fact for thousands. There are of course other forms of expression, and
these may prove to be consolations, but the immediacy of a thought or a
feeling transferred to a sound in the form of language is a building block
of human life.
As with outgoing signals, so it is with ourselves as receivers, as Jan
Schnupp observed: ‘Every time you talk to someone, you are effectively
engaging in something that can only be described as telepathic activity,
as you are effectively “beaming your thoughts into the other person’s
head,” using as your medium a form of “invisible vibrations.” Hearing,
in other words, is the telepathic sense that we take for granted (until we
lose it)’ (Schnupp, Nelken & King, 1). Yet there is an absence of sound
beyond any physical sense, an alienation that can besiege us with all our
faculties intact, situated as we may be within the most gregarious, con-
vivial of environments. The very sounds of the modern world that we
identified as potentially attacking forces prove at least that there is a con-
text for who we are. We require a formant to make our rejoinder. In his
play, One Man in his Humour, Ben Jonson writes ‘Language most shows
a man: Speak that I may see thee’. Sounds connect us to the world,
and language to one another. Language is only one set of expressive
sounds—there are of course others—but it is a fundamental of humanity
as Patsy Rodenburg has written:
5 UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB: ALONE IN THE SOUND WORLD 77
Without words we cannot make the world concrete for either ourselves or
others. We can get lost when we roam too long within the folds of silence.
Our feelings have no means of being charted, our ideas stay stunted and
unclear, our personalities remain confused and inexplicit. Words make the
world coherent…Words battle against the unexplainable, giving all things,
as Shakespeare says in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘a local habitation
and a name.’ (Rodenburg, 12)
Earlier in this book, we explored the positive power of silence and the
presence and importance to the imagination of the absorption of silent
sound in the sonic images of text. There is, however, a crucial difference
between this form of silence, the sought-for silence that brings peace
and tranquillity from which the imagination can soar, and what Salomé
Voegelin calls ‘muteness’:
Listening produces a sonic life-world that we inhabit, with or against our

will, generating its complex unity. Sound involves me closely in what I see;
it pulls the seen towards me as it grasps me by the ears. Sound renders
the object dynamic. It makes it “tremble with life” and gives it a sense of
process rather than a mute stability. Stability is mute, not silent but mute.
Silence still involves listening and hearing as a generative action of percep-
tion. Muteness by contrast numbs the auditory engagement. It applies a
local anaesthetic and disables the hearing process. (Voegelin, 11)
To be desensitised to or denied the subtleties of the world’s sound creates

a spiritual deafness and dumbness that is a negative silence; it is the break-
ing of this silence that moves us towards the expression of the personal
song of ourselves that seeks to share itself with our place and time. We
find ourselves surrounded every day by sound forces that are designed
to influence our thinking, create a mood or prompt subliminal seeds;
whether it be in-store or in-restaurant, the effects of piped music can be
various, some positive. For example, there have been experiments that
have shown how playing recordings of classical music can have the effect
of reducing threatening or aggressive behaviour, and no one would deny
the calming effect of well-chosen sound in an appropriate environment.
It is when the blandness of the sound, its very homogeneity, creates a
kind of mental blankness, or—with music that is too loud or intrusive—a
sense of tension and the inability to think clearly, that a numbness takes
over and the individual is, effectively, overtaken by some sort of corpo-
rate will. The ubiquity of what has been generically termed ‘Muzak’ is
78 S. STREET
the very factor that changes the brain’s response to it.1 We may become
so used to its presence that we actually notice when it is not present. It is
sound, but it can have the effect of negating our own internal sound, in
a similar way to tinnitus as it comes between the listener and the world
around them. Two things may happen: we may raise our voices to coun-
ter the sonic intrusion, thus lifting the sound level of the entire environ-
ment in a sort of sonic vicious circle, or we may give up and fall silent.
It is noticeable in some department stores that the gentle murmuring
of music actually quells the desire to communicate verbally, as the store
manifests itself as a presence visibly and invisibly around us.
Rodenburg noted in her work that the physical strength of the speak-
ing voice had diminished (surprising, given the volumes with which it
competes in the modern world). Yet when it comes to assertiveness,
say, within a group of people, this may be so; a dominant voice may be
linked to a dominant personality, and a more reticent inner voice may
lack the outward expression of a louder, although not necessarily more
valid orator. We find ourselves driven into silence, and we become soli-
tary within the prison cage. It is one of the ironies of modern living that
western society has bred a means and a need to ‘sell’ ourselves to others
through social media, to become ‘friends’ with people we have never—
and may never—meet and to create a persona behind which the real self
hides. There is a compulsion to communicate: yet without a physical
voice, we do not have a self that truly does so; increasingly, our situa-
tion denies us the oracy that is so much a part of our human condition.
There is a wealth of comfort, companionship and benign interaction at
the fingertips of regular Facebook users, connections with people from
the past are re-forged, like-minds find one another and new and fruit-
ful partnerships are made. Social media can be a major force for good
and for sharing useful information. At the same time, the silent sound
of text, discussed earlier, can shout unpalatable pseudo-truths and force
opinions on us from these social media and other portals of our increas-
ingly screen-based culture, and we may find ourselves silently shouting
back. The concept of the Facebook or Twitter cyber ‘troll’ is a form of
bullying that has been uniquely facilitated by the global and ubiquitous
use of personal technologies. Staring at a computer, reading an email or
admitting to our morning world the debates and opinions of Twitter and
Facebook, we open the door on the mental cacophony with which the
world bludgeons us. These silent voices are as much a part of the alien
invasion as those we explored in the previous chapter. When we type our
silent noisy responses, expressing a view or defending a stance, we raise
our own voice, contributing to the illusion of conversation, even as we
sit within the silence of ourselves. We find ourselves reminded of the def-
initions of positive and negative noise discussed in the last chapter, and
the words of Schwarz, Kahn and Cage; this is noise to the brain, just as
much as the sounds we would rather live without as we negotiate the
physical world.
The Politics of the Voice

The ability or the confidence to speak may be an individual ability, but
it may also infect a community in a sociopolitical sense; there are two
forms of grammar here: the voice and the Voice. Society can silence a
human voice by devaluing it, or it can silence the Voice of a community
by implying irrelevance to its geographical, ethnic or sociological values.
Both are critically dangerous to the civilised world. As Nick Couldry
has written, ‘“voice” is about more than just speaking and the growing
incitements to speak. An attention to voice means paying attention, as
importantly, to the conditions under which people’s practices of voice are
sustained and the outcomes of those practices validated’ (Couldry,113).
To this, Rodenburg adds, ‘on the most basic level we all simply want
someone to listen to us, to hear what we have to say’ (Rodenburg,10).
We yearn to break the silence around us and within us, make a poem out
of our existence, and share it.
The poetry of radio, and sound art have addressed this existential
need on a number of occasions; it is fitted to do so, growing as it does
out of audio darkness, out of its own silence. A sentence is made up of
words and the spaces between them. It is part of being human, to break
a silence, or to listen for a response. At the end of the first part of Orson
Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s story, The War of the
Worlds, there is just such a voice calling out of audio darkness. The com-
mentator on the roof of the CBS building is dead, killed by Martian gas,
but his mic is still live. We hear the boats on the East River, their fog
sirens dwindling, then a last vain call, chilling, as the world approached
the next darkness of 1939.
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Operator Four: 2X2L calling CQ….

2X2L calling CQ….
2X2L calling CQ…. New York.
Isn’t there anyone on the air?
Isn’t there anyone….
2X2L ——— (Cantril, 31)
To call and to receive no response, to hear silence, stillness, to be in an

anechoic chamber and then to be a part of that very stillness oneself is to
experience primal fear. It is death, and it is to be without purpose. In the
Canadian artist and musician Anna Friz’s sound work, The Clandestine
Transmissions of Pirate Jenny, created in 2000/2002, the central fictional
character, Jenny, who lives inside a radio, broadcasts at night, desperately
trying to make contact with someone—anyone.
This is Pirate Jenny on 49.850 megahertz. This is Free Radio Relay…tone…
Repeat, this is not a regular broadcast…tone…this is an S.O.S…tone…

Please respond…tone…tone…2
We are used to radio’s incessant obsession with broadcasting at us, rather

than a demonstration of itself as the raw material that exists in spite of
itself. Friz’s piece provides a powerful metaphor, using the radio studio
as an instrument for our inability to communicate. In Gacia Ouzounian’s
words, here ‘Friz re-inserts the noisy flesh of humanity back into the
equation, recuperating the real matter of communication: not sound or
signal or anything else that can be translated into wave-formation, but,
more fundamentally, the desire and the need for contact’.3
Radio and sound art are particularly useful tools in our interrogation
of the self and its relationship with the world. Radio is personal, it is one
to one, and like a poem, it speaks differently to everyone who encounters
it, because the ‘I’ that hears/reads does so from their own perspective.
In this, radio/sound has crucial commonalities and differences with pho-
tography. In his essay, Understanding a Photograph, John Berger writes:
A photograph is already a message about the event it records…

Photography is the process of rendering observation self-conscious…The
true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not
with form, but with time. One might argue that photography is as close to
music as to painting. (Berger, p.19)
Where sound and photography differ is in their relationship with time;

a photograph freezes time, while sound travels through it. We use the
phrase ‘real time’ to denote the linear passage through which listening
has to travel in order to recapture the experience of the original sound—
or silence. In this, sound asks its question of our place in the world in
other ways than Proust’s sense of smell or taste, or the click of a camera
shutter. A photograph or indeed a painting may evoke silent sound or it
may reflect profound silence. Either may be ‘heard’ in the same way as
the printed words on the page, which we ‘listened to’ in chapter two. It
is a ‘record’ just as a digital signal held on a memory card is a record of
an event. The difference is that the sound record passes before us and
is gone, just as the moment it holds vanished into history. The actual
moment the photograph recorded has also faded, along with the other
moments before and after it, while the souvenir of it lives on in its own
silent moment. The point is, it is just that—a silent stationary moment.
The novelist, John Fowles, writing in Fay Godwin’s photographic essay,
Land and looking at a photograph of Thomas Hardy taken with his new
bicycle outside Max Gate in Dorset, found himself asking of the picture,
‘what happened five seconds before? What happened five seconds after,
when the photographer (Hardy’s friend, the scholar-parson Thomas
Perkins) took his head from beneath the black cloth and announced that
the very recent present was now eternal future?’ (Fowles, in Godwin, x)
Our sound recording, while it cannot turn the clock back, and cannot
hold the moment as a photograph can, can at least preserve the decay of
time, enabling us to hear it ring. The other significant difference is that
a photograph—like a moving image—places us as a witness to an event,
whereas a sound record sets us in the frame as a participant. So, as Pirate
Jenny begs for a response from the silence of static, we wait and listen
with her, inside her stillness as well as our own. If ‘the true content of a
photograph is invisible’, so it is with sound; little wonder that the early
radio pioneers considered their medium with a reverence bordering on
mysticism.
Ghosts in the Physical World

Sigmund Freud’s essay on The Uncanny, discussed in the previous chap-
ter, explores places and moments in our world and in our selves that
seem to activate alien presences, instances ‘when the boundary between
fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of
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something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a sym-

bol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolises’
(Freud,150). Sound itself has the potential to be uncanny, particularly, as
we have seen, when its context is unexplained, or juxtaposed with senses
that are sending our brains counter information. Film-makers have fre-
quently exploited this; a rocking horse in a disused playroom is melan-
choly. If, however, the horse begins to slowly rock of its own volition,
and the innocent sound of a child’s musical box spontaneously accom-
panies the action with its tune, the moment becomes uncanny. The
innocence has become alien. Indeed, we each of us have the capacity to
regress into childhood, where there were more things requiring expla-
nation, and therefore where the potential for fear and unease were ever
present.
Sound is always disappearing because it is temporal, as are we. The
loudest sound only emphasises the silence around it, so in its bleakest
incarnation, sound is a memento mori. Looked at this way, the tolling of
a bell, which on one level we may see as a bridge between the material
world and that of the spirit and imagination, may also be heard as a met-
aphor for life and death. Depending on where you stand on the perma-
nence or mutability of the life force, the absence of all sound represents
an end of all things; the silence of God, the silence of death. We may
keep our radios on as background sound for the reassurance they bring
us, to break the silence and act as a distraction to introversion and loneli-
ness, and to connect us to the world. There is an inner silence that may
be equated with chosen solitude. Equally there is a silence within that is
the epitome of loneliness and abandonment, a stillness that intensifies as
the gregarious noise of the world around us increases. At the same time,
the juxtaposition of outer sound with inner silence can be devastating,
and the interaction between the visual and the aural can sometimes pro-
vide a disconnect that is surreal and frightening.
This dichotomy is one which film-makers exploit to great effect; the
visuals may tell us one story, but the soundtrack sends another message
entirely, while remaining connected, however obliquely, to the over-
all narrative, and creating an effect which is both illogical and strange.
The film director Chu-Li Shewring recalls just such a juxtaposition
from a walk in West London. In the shadow of Chelsea Football Club’s
Stamford Bridge ground lies Brompton Cemetery, the final resting place
for thousands of former citizens of the capital, some famous, others now
forgotten. To walk through the graveyard on a Saturday afternoon, with
Chelsea playing at home, is to experience this disconnect in an extraor-

dinary way. The roar of the crowd pours over the silent gravestones, and
the contrast between the living and the dead is never more poignant. For
Shewring, intent on the inscriptions on the stones, the sudden burst of
sound from the adjacent football crowd was shocking in the extreme: ‘I
wasn’t aware of the stadium, but I suddenly became aware of this huge
roar, a shower of sound all around me, unseen and so disconnected.
Being in a cemetery and hearing all this life—so visceral—made it very
haunting and strange’.4 Hearing the voices of the still living, and see-
ing the evidence of what we become, made the ultimate silence of death
even more total in the imagination. The negative property of stillness but
‘no peace, no silence’ (words by Ovid to which we shall return) is the
barrier many seek to overcome in a quest for meaning and spiritual fulfil-
ment.
People who experience deafness will know only too well that loss of
hearing does not necessarily mean silence; the curse of varying forms of
tinnitus, internal noise coming between the listener and the world can be
deeply debilitating. Yet sound is multimodal. In 1978, the composer and
sound artist Laurie Anderson created an installation, referred to earlier,
which she called ‘The Handphone Table’. Listeners sit at a table that has
been wired with sound; they put their elbows on the table and cup their
hands round their ears. Sound from the table is then conducted through
the bones of their arms to their ears. Michel Serres identifies the skin
as a major sensory organ: ‘In it, through it, with it, the world and the
body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common
edge’ (Serres, 80). Thus, as Sam Belinfante writes, “‘The Handphone
Table’ demands an expansion of our audio physiology, as well as any
preconceived notions of listening’ (Sam Belinfante in Stephanides &
Kohlmaier,15). We hear the world through our whole bodies, the world
as vibration as well as actual sound; as the tram passes, we feel it in our
chest, as the underground train passes beneath our feet, we are aware of
it as feeling as much as a sound. In a number of his films, the Russian
director Andrei Tarkovsky used the device of sound vibrating through
objects as symptoms of unseen action from beyond the characters’ con-
trol that nonetheless directly affects the lives of the people with whom
we are concerned in the story. For example, in his last film The Sacrifice,
the jingling of crystal glasses on a tray proves to be caused by warplanes
passing overhead, a sound proclaiming the outbreak of nuclear conflict.
We hear the glasses, and are confused, as are the characters in the film
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itself, as to the cause, only for this to be revealed seconds later as the
aircraft fly over; it is a powerful moment that grows out of silence, and it
is created by the juxtaposition of two sounds of cause and effect through
vibration: subtlety and brutality.
Mara Mills reminds us that ‘sound waves transfer between media
(air, water, solids) and can be experienced by sensory domains beyond
the ear. Vibrations, visual recordings and speech gestures are all possi-
ble components of an acoustic event’ (Mills, in Novak and Sakakeeny,
52). With all this sound, how could we ever feel alone? In his great
film about the Carthusian monks of the Grand Chartreuse, Into Great
Silence, Philip Gröning explores an inner spiritual silence framed by an
acoustic outer world. This is internal silence sought by choice, and the
idea of taking a vow of silence is not uncommon in various religions.
For the composer Esther Venrooij, this may be analogous to the experi-
ence of moments within music: The creation of an inner silence by lis-
tening to music or our surroundings evokes a dreamlike state of mind,
where one drifts into a mental space, intensifying the other senses…This
silence is about becoming silent as a listener’ (Venrooij in Stephanides
& Kohlmaier, p. 95). It is when there is no choice, when the listener
cannot respond to break their own silence, that inner stillness becomes
most lonely and alienated. As Venrooij adds, ‘we are always looking for
a meaning in what we experience and we are always projecting ourselves
onto our surroundings, even when we see, hear or experience nothing’
(Ibid., 98).
The Unheeded Voice

Like a photograph, sound can be utility as well as art, journalism at the
same time as it is poetry, composition as well as random thought. It is
the common denominator that visual and sound images share of the
human agency behind them however that renders them their power
and profundity, both with their potential for inclusivity and expression
of individual will. The visual and the auditory are carriers of messages—
and they are equally capable of breaking the spiritual silence. The pho-
tograph is an organisation of light, while sound is an organisation of air,
and this crucial difference means that sound itself requires a carrier, as,
unlike light, it cannot exist in a vacuum. Only sound, when it rushes in
upon us as we step from our home into the world outside, gives us the
sense of connection with the life around us, because connecting is mostly
about listening. At the same time, we only fully connect when we under-
stand that we are being heard. The voice of a people, an ethnic group
or a marginalised section of society, when it is unheard, or unlistened-
to, turns in on itself. Not being heard, expressing opinions or demands
that are ignored, creates an inner silence within constituent members of
the group, fuelling resentment and building divisions. Rodenburg has
expressed it well:
Many of us have been taught not to feel easy about expressing our words
and sounds openly. Our society like to control the volume and keep us
vocal hostage; it doesn’t want to hear the thoughts and opinions of cer-
tain groups like children, women and minorities. Too often we only like to
hear the voices of so-called ‘first class citizens’, well-bred and well-toned.
Ironically, it is usually the ‘other’ classes of citizens whose voices still retain
the habits of natural release. (Rodenburg 27)
We will return to the voice in the final chapter of this book; in the
meantime, it is worth emphasising that being silent in the sound world
may refer to the stilling of a sociopolitical group voice as much as to a
single personal voice. The inability to find a means of expression, and
therefore to interact with a broader society, lies at the heart of many
communal and individual ills; community radio, as has been suggested
earlier, is valuable in this respect, in that it can give a voice to those
who were previously only passive—and disenfranchised—listeners. There
are limitations, however, in certain forms of the medium. Broadly, such
local media is divided up into communities of geography and communi-
ties of interest. Sometimes, these communities overlap, and where they
are seen to do so, integration and interaction tend to work reasonably
well. The risk with communities of interest is that the voices do not
penetrate beyond the circle to which they are specifically relevant. Thus,
consolidation will occur within the group, but there is less likelihood of
a wider understanding, because other groups feel excluded. Just as an
individual may feel loneliness in a crowd, so may a social group within
a wider community, and where there is cultural silence, there is a loss
of understanding. This form of silence may be actively used in political
ways to dominate certain areas of society and to instigate circumstances
and climates of non-participation. Maintaining a ‘radio silence’ is a pow-
erful way of building strategies without interference. As Ochoa Gautier
has written:
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In such use, it is understood as the opposite of “having a voice,” where

voice is rendered as a sign of identity and presence of the subject, and is
contrasted with types of dialogism that have historically been seen in
Western modernity as a key dimension of political participation and of the
constitution of the public sphere. (Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, in Novak
and Sakakeeny. P. 183)
It may be that it is in the interests of a ruling elite to prohibit—or at least

discourage—the voice of certain sections of its populace, or indeed, more
broadly in silencing society itself. A mute society is one that is in grave
danger, and one of the most pernicious of all silences is that of denial,
whether it be for personal or political reasons. The Latin maxim, ‘Qui
Tacet Consentire Videtur’, roughly translated, means ‘he who remains
silent is understood to consent,’ and nowhere is this idea more morally
interrogative than in discussions of political expedience. The broadcaster,
journalist and teacher Tim Crook writes of ‘a legacy of doubt and out-
rage about the motives and actions of Allied governments’ in the years
prior to the outbreak of World War II, and that ‘a lingering controversy
remains that more could have been done to save the lives of millions of
Jewish victims’ (Crook, 192). Certainly, as early as 1933, the year that
H.G. Wells published his book of ‘future history’, The Shape of Things
to Come, there were already many signs of persecution within Germany;
indeed, it was in March of that year that the first concentration camp,
Dachau, was completed and opened. A mute informed voice is like an
eye that looks the other way. Later, when the war was nearing its end,
the full horror of camps like these became evident, but Crook tells us
that ‘what the world heard in April and May 1945 it could have heard
in July and August 1944’ (Ibid. 193). Radio, in Crook’s view, ‘failed
the purposes of civilisation’ not only by delaying the reporting of these
things, but in interrogating the doctrinal causes in the years prior to
the disaster: ‘There is no evidence of radio documentary attempting to
explain or analyse a generation of anti-Semitic writers and philosophers
who were to provide the ideological impetus for genocide’ (Ibid. 194).
The coming of broadcast portability, both in terms of making and
listening to media, has been a story of increasing democratic liberation.
Remembering his early days as a producer in the Northern Region of
the BBC, forty years later, D.G. Bridson looked back from the vantage
point of the 1970s on a time of stringent radio script editing and censor-
ship. ‘That spontaneous speech should have been banned by the BBC for
the first odd twenty years of broadcasting is almost unbelievable…The

result, needless to say, is that few beside professional actors, professional
speakers, and what might be called professional personalities ever got
near the microphone at all’ (Bridson, 53). Later, during the 1950s when
Charles Parker used the portable ‘Midget’ tape recorder to make The
Radio Ballads on location in the workplace, the voice of identity gained
a democratic liberation that had begun with Bridson, Denis Mitchell
and others. The first in the series, The Ballad of John Axon, broadcast in
1958, created a sensation in its use of location sound, and also for the
decision on the part of Parker and Ewan MacColl to dispense with the
traditional ‘voice of God’ BBC studio narrator, replacing that convention
with a specifically composed folk-style musical narrative. Nonetheless,
the control remained with the producer; in place of a blue pencil cut-
ting words on a page, a razor blade cut tape. This was meticulously
crafted radio after all. The voice was real, but it was mitigated through
the decisions of the programme maker, the ultimate aim being—as with
all electronic mass media—to create a period within a broadcast sched-
ule that was as powerful and/or as entertaining as possible. Breeding
on inertia and laissez-faire, ruling systems have been said by some radi-
cal philosophers to have an interest in maintaining passivity and lack of
voice and response. Sound and silence are political; an intellectualised,
opinionated and vocal populace, expressing its identity—a voice made
up of individuals—has long since been unsettling to governing bodies,
as noted by Noam Chomsky in the previous chapter. A society that sub-
mits its voice to the voice of its ruling elite, as communicated increas-
ingly through mass media, is a mute society. So the process of call and
response becomes one-way, dictating social, cultural and political terms
to silent majorities…and more crucially, minorities. As early as 1927,
Bertolt Brecht wrote, in a short article, unpublished until 2000, entitled
‘Radio—An Antedeluvian Invention?’:
I strongly wish that after their invention of radio the bourgeoisie would
make a further invention that enables us to fix for all time what the radio
communicates. Later generations would then have the opportunity to mar-
vel how a certain caste was able to tell the whole planet what it had to say
and at the same time how it enabled the planet to see that it had nothing
to say. (Brecht, 38–9)
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The fact that radio was being misused was one of the motives stated by
Orson Welles for his appropriation of the CBS in 1938 for his War of the
Worlds broadcast, which assaulted the credibility of the new medium, and
in this, the microphone itself became an instrument of liberation. Much
later, in a 1988 article which interrogated Walter Ong’s statement that
‘the typical male voice can articulate words at a far greater volume than
can the typical female voice’ (Ong, 8), Anne McKay examined the role
of the development of electronic amplification as a contributing factor
to the liberation of the female voice in physical and sociopolitical terms,
concluding that ‘it is certain that these devices helped to complete the
transformation of public speech from a formal, combative, argumenta-
tive style to a more pacific, intimate and informal mode, better aligned
with female conditioning’ (McKay in Kramarae, 206). Notwithstanding,
equality of gender—as with other aspects of contested identity—is not
simply a matter of being heard, but of being listened to and recognised:
‘Even with the microphone on the platform, women have had to con-
tinue to struggle for legitimation of their right to speak publicly, par-
ticularly when their topics or roles have been in conflict with men of
influence’ (Ibid).5
The ability to say what one thinks and what one sees breaks through
the fog of muteness, and places the individual immediately within the
debate. The voice of the written word, language in whatever medium it
is expressed, is a force that integrates personal and group identity, and
can express an opinion that was once internal and is now out in the
world, contributing potentially to what happens next. The playwright
Harold Pinter asked the question:
Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate,

alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspond-
ence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we
are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality
– to distort what is, to distort what happens – because we fear it? (Pinter,
quoted in Batty, 77)
When the Sound Stops

Muteness is a different thing to elective inner peace, the silence that the
monks seek; for most of us, the inner self is a noisy place, as the poet
René Daumal reminds us when he speaks of ‘the tumult that rages in
your body when you listen to yourself. There are rumours of combat,
the snores of sleepers, the cries of beasts, the noise of the whole uni-
verse’ (quoted by Iddon in Kohlmaier and Polimekanos, 64). We inhabit,
as Daumal eloquently emphasises, ‘skin full of rumours from the echoes
of subterranean cities’ (Ibid.). Interaction is as much—if not more—
about listening as sounding ourselves to the world around us. It is also
about having the means and opportunity to do both. As we have seen,
the ability to listen selectively through the noise of what we hear is an
acquired skill, and in a society that has trained its citizens to broadcast
themselves at the expense of listening to what the world is telling them,
while suppressing group interaction within certain sections of that soci-
ety, this becomes harder and harder. The noise of the world—to which
we contribute—ironic as it may seem, creates its own sound suppres-
sants, that is to say, a negative silence that dulls and desensitises our
selves, and changes the nature of interaction and therefore personal iden-
tity. We are what we hear, and language is only the conduit for mean-
ing. Michel Serres has written, ‘Before making sense, language makes
noise: you can have the latter without the former, but not the other way
around’ (Serres, 120). The words may have meaning, could we but hear
them, but the sound of a voice, the tone, the pace, the volume of speech
communicates before language articulates it. Yet the problem remains,
of trying to tune into a thousand radio stations at the same time. Each
individual sound may be vital, a crucial plea or a statement, but heard
together, this cacophony of Babel becomes noise, and our listening
capacity shuts down, leaving us alone. And on top of this comes the
non-human noise of the machinery of living. There is so much that miti-
gates against the discovery and preservation of the fragile sound that is
the inner self, and the circumstances in which it may become heard and
acknowledged. The blurring of individual sound into generalised white
noise, in the end has the same effect as that loneliest of all auditory envi-
ronments, the anechoic chamber.
Somewhere within us there may be a still centre, but total stillness
in our relationship to the world is inhuman, and we distrust it. When
the sound stops—even the babble of the sound aliens—the animal
in us grows tense; we listen harder, we seek a sound that breaks in on
the emptiness, a sound that either puts us at our ease, or confirms our
fears. This kind of silence, coming sometimes from within us but often
from outside, beyond our control, is sonic darkness; and as Donald
McWhinnie has written, in the context of radio, ‘during silence, things
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happen invisibly’ (McWhinnie, 89). This can terrifying, disorientating,

but perhaps worse is the fear that things have ceased to happen alto-
gether. We only become aware of sonic loneliness when we contrast the
desire to communicate with the world, and our inability to do so within
it. It is in the space between, and the vacuum of it, where personal iden-
tity fails to interact, where ‘call and response’ breaks down, that we
become deeply psychologically isolated. There is a powerful metaphor
for this profound loneliness within a world pulsing with sound, in a short
recording held in the British Library’s sound archive. Some years ago,
while making a radio programme about the preservation of sometimes
fragile tapes, discs and cylinders as witnesses to history and Place, I inter-
viewed Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds.
Among a number of recordings, Cheryl played me to illustrate the value
of audio artefacts as historical documents was one recorded on 25 May
1983 by John Sincock, of the Hawaiian Kaua’i O’o bird (Moho bracca-
tus)6 This creature can now no longer be found on the planet. Here was
a profound expression of sound poetics, a recording, not only of a bird
that has ceased to exist, but actually of the final living example of its spe-
cies; ornithological studies showed that previously two were known, but
one had died in a recent hurricane. We sat in silence as the bird called,
paused for a familiar response that never came, then called forlornly
once more, as a low rumble of thunder echoed in the distance. It would
be easy to fall into the trap of anthropomorphising the experience, but
equally, it was impossible not to be moved as we listened; here was the
last of his kind, calling out for his mate, and receiving no answer, call-
ing forlornly to a world where there was nothing left that understood or
spoke his language. For a few years more, there were isolated sightings
of this lone bird, and then it too vanished, and the species was declared
extinct. Like the soundman in War of the Worlds and Pirate Jenny, we are
all creatures of interaction, and the question that receives no answer is
the hardest thing on earth to contemplate.
Notes
1. The term ‘muzak’ (in lower case) is often used as generic one to denote
background music. The origins date back to 1910 when American inven-
tor George Squier developed the technical basis for sending music to
groups of people through wires. Later it was found that by customising
pace and style of music to such groups, the productivity of workers could
be controlled. Squier’s company pursued this concept from the 1920s in

the USA, and the effect on those who were affected by it in the workplace
became known as ‘Stimulus Progression’. The name, ‘Muzak’ was trade-
marked by Muzak LLC in December 1954.
2. Friz, Anna, The Clandestine Transmissions of Pirate Jenny (2000/2002)
excerpt: https://soundcloud.com/annafriz/the-clandestine-transmissions
(Accessed 19.11.2016).
3. Ouzounian, Gacia, ‘The Spatial Politics of Radio: Anna Friz’s Critical
Utopias.’ The Radio Journal, 5.2/3, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/
pod/dod-idx/spatial-politics-of-radio-anna-frizs-critical-utopias.pdf?c=icm
c;idno=bbp2372.2008.060, (accessed 19.11.2016).
4. Shewring, Chu-Li, interviewed by the author for The Sound of Fear
(Produced by May, Julian, for BBC Radio 4, 19 October 2011).
5. See also Mitchell, Caroline (ed.) Women and Radio: Airing Differences.
London: Routledge, 2000.
6. British Library catalogue number: http://sami.bl.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0
/0/5?searchdata1=CKEY4979112 (accessed 5.12.2016).
CHAPTER 6
Searching for the Sound of Self
Abstract  We continue to listen for voices, both within our own silent
sound world, and the incoming messages that place us in Time. These
voices may either develop our concept of who we are, or reinforce our pre-
conceptions. We conclude with a return to the sound absorbed through
the deeper silence of the mind. Sound—like life itself—exists in time; we
catch it as it passes us, and as we do so, it is already fading, moving on
and away from us, becoming memory. That in itself is the very stuff of
poetry, ‘heard’ in the mind, transmitted from the page, or shared from the
mind of another, through a song (one form of externalised expression of a
poem), absorbed into the identity of a generation. The need to be a voice
remains undiminished, and the means to express our personal leitmotif are
greater than ever; we may argue that even apparently ‘unheard’ personal
voices feed into the zeitgeist and energy of an age.
Keywords  Personalised sound · Universal voices · Voice as socio-

political power · The art of listening
Hearing and Listening
Our self can be an unquiet place, as Michel Serres, seeking silence in the
ancient empty amphitheatre of Epidaurus reminded himself:

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58676-2_6
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No matter how far I travel, poor subject that I am, I never manage to put
any distance between myself and the droning of the language that shaped
me. What merely resonated within my mother’s womb is a clamour in this
stone conch, and finds itself echoed in my innermost ear. The threshold
that I imagined remains impassable, I am made up of the others I claim to
have left behind, even alone they make the same noise in my chest, residu-
ally. (Serres, 93)
The key to our sonic identity is listening and creating the conditions in
which creative and positive listening can exist. Listening is the condition
in which we seek connections that relate to the concept of self. This self
is a different being to the persona we may adopt, which is capable of
being shaped by will and by circumstance. We may adopt different tones
of voice according to where we are, or who we are talking to. A num-
ber of people, asked about how they thought of us, might well come
to different conclusions. The jazz of life plays on, and we adapt our
instrument—the outward expression of how we would like to be per-
ceived—according to the tune that happens to be playing at any given
moment. As we have discussed, many of us live in a world in which cre-
ating an image has become so dominant that we have grown skilled at
assuming a mask, which we place before ourselves on social media and
in other public places. This is not the real self. The voice coach, Noah
Pikes has suggested that it is in the unguarded moments, when our true
voice escapes from the artifice with which we so artfully surround our-
selves that ‘the voices of our souls call out from the shadows and in cer-
tain moments take over from our civilised voices—in crowds, emotional
states, sexual excitement, in neuroses and psychoses, in violent acts,
and sometimes even in sleep, or when awakening, shouting or gasping
from…nightmare’.1 Meantime, our outer self absorbs the world around
us, ‘hears’ voices and sounds as we read, takes in the cadences, dialects,
accents and turns of phrase, and applies to our personal image those
sonic qualities that we feel will make us most acceptable to our chosen
society. We are, therefore, hearing, listening and observing all the time,
and as we do so, we are adjusting our output to fit our audience, just as a
radio station deliberates on a playlist for its chosen demographic.
There is, however, another self that listens beneath this layer, a being
far more subtle and profound, that has to do with the reality of being. It
is by focusing consciously on sound, just as we do when we strive to hear
a distant voice, or identify a meaning, that the ‘deep listening’ Pauline
6 SEARCHING FOR THE SOUND OF SELF 95
Oliveros considered so valuable can come into play. We may consider

that it is transmission that binds us to others, but for Oliveros, the act of
listening is equally interactive, if not more so: ‘Each listener by the act of
‘listening’ affects the field and thus the form…Sounds near one another
influence one another. Listeners near one another affect or influence one
another with active listening (Oliveros, 88–89). Just such a set of circum-
stances has created performances of John Cage’s 4’33”. We interact with
one another just by sharing an auditory experience. Audiences taking
part in group listening sessions featuring radio programmes have spoken
of a heightened intensity of listening, born of turning what had previ-
ously been a solitary experience into a communal one. Sam Belinfante
has underlined the point; committed listening with complete absorption
can bypass ego and provide an event that is both personal and interactive
between audience members at the same time, an enhancement of the self
as both individual and group member. ‘To listen…is to accept that we
are always already shared, and that our “image” is in continual transition’
(Belinfante in Stephanides & Kohlmaier, 12).
We cannot escape the codes that we ourselves have created to articu-
late and interrogate our own identity as we listen to ourselves listening
to the world. Written language is silent between the moment the author
writes it and the instant it enters the thought of the reader. Written
music on a stave is ‘heard’ by the composer and musician before it is
played, but is physical sound when it is played. Music is the metaphor for
this whole quest. Jean-Luc Nancy has written:
Music is the art of the hope for resonance: a sense that does not make
sense except because of its resounding in itself. It calls to itself and recalls
itself, reminding itself and by itself, each time, of the birth of music, that
is to say, the opening of a world of resonance, a world taken away from
the arrangements of objects and subjects, brought back to its own ampli-
tude and making sense or else having its truth only in the affirmation that
modulates this amplitude. (Nancy, 67)
The troubadours and balladeers who spoke their poems in times before
words were written, varied their songs according to the place, the moment
and the mood, while retaining the essence of the story, and although there
is a kind of electricity that runs through poetry, framed in a shape or struc-
ture of thought, it has at its heart a spontaneity of sound that is essen-
tially linguistic, and remains, in T.S. Eliot’s words in The Music of Poetry,
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‘one person talking to another; and this is true if you sing it, for sing-
ing is another way of talking’ (Eliot 58). We improvise our own day-to-
day melody in partnership with the same accompaniment on a daily basis,
responding to the moment, however radically changed the moment may
be in our current time. It hides a poignant subtext; as the composer David
Toop has said, ‘because sound is constantly vanishing, there is always that
sense of loss: as soon as we make a sound, it is gone, and that connects us
to a greater sense of loss, and of course the greatest loss of all is death’.2
This returns us to our earlier premise, that of the silence within us in
which imaginative temporal sound creates itself, the thought behind the
voice. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid speaks of such a place:
At the world’s centre lies a place between

The lands and seas and regions of the sky,
The limits of the threefold universe,
Whence all things everywhere, however far,
Are scanned and watched, and every voice and word
Reaches its listening ears. (Ovid, 275)
The poet speaks here of Rumour, but we make rumours in the mind
out of the vacuum of stillness. As human beings, we yearn for connection
with the world, and where our surroundings offer us mixed messages,
our inner silence blends with them. Rumour—the imagination—is our
personal radio station:
Inside, no peace, no silence anywhere,

And yet no noise, but muted murmurings
Like waves one hears of some far-distant sea,
Or like a last late rumbling thunder-role. (Ibid.)
The Song Inside

I am a murmur of internal sound, but that murmur seems to be stirring
on a bed of deeper silence that lies beyond reach—the place monks seek
perhaps?—while around me there is the more edgy world of cars outside,
a distant radio playing, the creaking of the old house around me, and
footsteps coming up the garden path. It all blends into a kind of Musique
concrète that, together with my other senses, proves to me that I am
alive. At any time, I can engage with this physical sonic world by making
my own sound—striking my fist on the table, slamming a door, speak-
ing, shouting, crying, laughing or singing. By doing any of these things,
I am projecting my being onto the ongoing symphony around me and
declaring my right to a presence in it. When I interact with another from
outside my personal sphere (home, family, loved ones), I am claiming
those rights further, while playing a part in the daily opera that began
while I slept—in fact, a production that actually never ceases, night or
day. It is my voice that is the first and most direct force for connection.
As soon as I am asked a question, I am obligated to answer, and that
answer, together with the way it is phrased, coloured by language, tone,
accent, dialect, pitch, volume and timbre go towards creating an impres-
sion of who I am. I can manipulate this instrument to emphasise my self,
but it remains beneath all else, my self. However much a jazz trumpeter
may find various voices in his instrument, it remains a trumpet…but his
trumpet.
At the same time, I am surrounded by visual images, and we may
agree that if we are sighted, then the visual dominates our impression of
what is around us. Visual images obsess us: how we look, what we look
at, who we look at and are attracted to or otherwise, how we form our
prejudices, and our technologies support this. When we hear a sound, we
need to see the source of the sound. Otherwise, it remains a mystery, and
potentially a danger, so here sound is the servant of sight. Yet sight with-
out sound makes us an observer rather than a participant, and it is the
nuances and subtleties of sound, of hearing and listening and respond-
ing emotionally that makes us a player in the drama, and not merely an
audience member. Modern life and developing technologies increasingly
blend the sensory experience, and our organs of receptivity send more
and more complex multimedia messages for the brain to unravel and
from which to make meaning. Taking a Darwinian view, it may be, as
Steven Connor has said, that ‘the energetic impingements and abrasions
of the senses one upon another may yet make the ear, with its acceptance
of plural stimulus, and hearing, with its qualities of openness, complex-
ity and interpenetration, a richer and more responsive metaphor for the
self and its sensory composites and concretions than the self-detaching
eye…’ (Connor, in Smith, 66).
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Given this possibility, the ear can be a dominant force in ‘reading’ our
environment and will therefore be required to work harder than ever to
absorb this increasingly complicated sound world, while the brain tries
even harder to interpret messages which aurally may or may not con-
tradict what other senses seem to be conveying. At the same time, an
interactive world requires a response from us to all it throws at us, and
this response to a major extent dictates our place in society. Initially, we
only have our voice, whether it be silently expressed through the writ-
ten word, through art or—first and foremost—through the voice. Our
action—or reaction—is crucial; the voice with which we express ourselves
is governed by who we are, and from where we come, and the world
judges us on the perceptions it gains from us through the sound of our-
selves. The most visceral of these instruments is the voice as it is physi-
cally made and heard, and as Amanda Weidman reminds us, ‘voice as a
sonic and material phenomenon is inevitably embedded in social rela-
tions that shape how voices are produced, felt and heard’ (Weidman in
Novak & Sakakeeny, 241). Our voice speaks the thoughts of the mind,
just as the ear sends sound to the mind to read. Our voice/mind as an
instrument is capable of as infinite a range of subtleties in sound, as is the
ear/mind as an interpretive device. It has to be a partnership, and at the
start of it, and out of it all comes a music, our music. The cadence, syn-
tax and tone—and most of all the variants of pitch and timbre mentioned
earlier—play the tune that the world hears, declaring and identifying our
tribe, nationhood, culture, social status and personality.
When we are denied the ability to communicate these things, the per-
ception the world has of us is diminished and we become locked in a
prison where interaction is denied. In 1930, Helen Keller—both blind
and deaf—was able to demonstrate how her vocal liberation was attained
with her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Fortunately, this was recorded on film,
so we have a moving (in every sense) testimony on the power of non-
cochlear listening through vibration, in the actual words of teacher and
pupil. Sullivan had discovered that Keller could feel the vibration of the
spoken word through the placement of her hand on specific parts of
her teacher’s face. Thus, she found that if the thumb was placed on the
throat of the speaker, resting on the larynx, then hard sounds such as
‘G’ were felt. With the first finger on the lips, Helen felt letters such as
‘B’, while with the second finger on the side of the nose, nasal sounds,
‘N’ and ‘M’ were detected. After the seventh lesson, Keller was able to
speak her first sentence, word by word, aloud: ‘I am not dumb now’.3 In
that one short statement is held the moment in which the inner self con-
nected with the world, a paradigm for the voice as personal expression
and sociopolitical force at one and the same time, breaking its silence.
On the other hand, silence may be chosen as expression in itself. I
remember a conversation with the late Kathleen Raine about the poet,
David Gascoyne. At the time, in the mid-1990s, Gascoyne had written
little for many years, and yet Raine was able to say: ‘I have heard David’s
silence speak more eloquently than all the noise of words going on inces-
santly around him’.4 As Mladen Dolar says of silence, ‘in its proper sense
it is the other of speech, not just of sound, it is inscribed inside the reg-
ister of speech where it delineates a certain stance, an attitude—even
more, an act’ (Dolar, 152). We can choose to remain silent, and that
silence can in itself be a statement. A theatre or film director, or a radio
producer, is very aware of the power of silence as a positive thing; used
in juxtaposition with loud noise it can be indeed a dynamic force. The
music of silence and the relationship between forte and sotto voce work
alongside elements of pitch and pace, and take us to the euphony of
sound that can touch the emotions before it even reaches the cognitive
parts of the brain. No wonder playwrights understand so well the value
of the dramatic pause.
When a song or a melody is made—a song in the sense than society
understands the word—it is a voice dramatised by emphasising qualities
that already exist in spoken speech. Poetic expression—a music in itself—
comes naturally when we are impassioned. Peter Levi has expressed
it well: ‘Poetry is language heightened by insistent sounds or repeated
rhythms…Once you use language consciously and intently you cannot
escape the special demands that are inbuilt into poetry’ (Levi, p. 30). In
doing so, we are tapping into a legacy of speech and language that shows
itself in popular culture and the folk tradition; the ballad form, which
sits equally as a poem and as a song, is evidence of this, and our identity
grows and develops, while remaining rooted in a group past. ‘Language
is inherited, and so these demands and these laws have always pre-existed
in the language of some older generation: in the roots of the particular
language we speak (ibid.). Hear a folk song sung, and something deep
within us stirs, linking our voice and ear to a source we find hard to iden-
tify, precisely because it is so intimately tied into our personal identity.
We may have begun expressing our tribal identity by beating on a drum,
and then we perhaps began to chant, implementing pitch and volume to
identify self. The poem became the song. There is something deep and
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fundamental here that underpins group and individual identity, some-

thing more basic than nationhood; it is primitive, and it lies at the core
of self. Charles Darwin recognised it:
We have every reason to believe that man possessed these [musical] facul-
ties at a very remote period, for singing and music are extremely ancient
arts. Poetry, which may be considered as the offspring of song, is likewise
so ancient that many persons have felt astonishment that it should have
arisen during the earliest ages of which we have any record. (Darwin, 334)
Because we make a personal music every time we speak, it is hardly to

be wondered at that musical expression runs so deep in us through lan-
guage and its dramatisation in vocalisation and instrumentation. As
Levitin reminds us, ‘musical activity involves nearly every region of the
brain that we know about, and nearly every neural subsystem’ (Levitin,
85–6). When we make music, we make a shape in sound, and by so
doing we create an illusion and a metaphor for a structure that in turn
demonstrates a meaning for ourselves. The shapes we make depend on
personal experience and grow out of that experience, finding expression
from memory, living in the world, and as Levitin says, ‘neural structures
that can learn and modify themselves with each new song we hear, and
with each new hearing of an old song. Our brains learn a kind of gram-
mar that is specific to the music of our culture, just as we learn to speak
the language of our culture’ (Ibid.,108). This is one reason why not only
listening to, but actively making music is helpful to people with memory
disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Music happens in the present, note
by note, like life itself, and the moment has a currency that connects us
directly to the world. We speak and we sing to communicate. We do so
in order that our species might survive. It is as fundamental as that; the
poetics of sound lie at the root of existence.
Technologies are developing that use voice recognition in various
ways—commercial and clinical—that in themselves may ultimately throw
new light on the nature of personality and the relationship between mind
and body. Using algorithms developed from the speech patterns of peo-
ple with particular conditions, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s dis-
ease, it is apparently possible to detect early signs of illness, based on the
kinds of words used, phrasing and overall speech quality.5 Such is the
intimate connection between our voice and who we are, that it is per-
fectly reasonable to deduce that a change in health should be perceivable
through our vocal tone as much as other observable physical symptoms,

given the software and hardware capable of conducting an informed
examination. The voice is our lifeline to the world, and it is as much a
means of crying for help (even unconsciously) as it is a means of attract-
ing attention, for whatever the reason. It is primal, and its first sounds
may have been initiated by the need to survive.
Darwin certainly considered it a strong possibility: ‘Although the
sounds emitted by animals of all kinds serve many purposes, a strong
case can be made out, that the vocal organs were primarily used and per-
fected in relation to the propagation of the species’ (Darwin, 330). Love
is the theme of the vast majority of songs in every genre; when we feel
the need to express our deepest emotion, it is through poetry and song.
We have inherited this as part of who we are, and the sound of emotion
belongs to the most basic of animalistic instinct. We use it with varying
degrees of sophistication in word-play, pitch, tone and rhythm when we
speak, sing, play or seek to persuade, infinite variations on a theme. The
irony was not lost on Darwin:
The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his varied tones and
cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects
that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his
half-human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their
mutual courtship and rivalry. (Ibid. 337)6
‘I Pray Thee, Hear Me Speak’

So says the imprisoned Antonio to Shylock.7 If, however, we take a
Darwinian view of personal communication, we may come to the con-
clusion that certain classes and individuals attain precedence over others
through opportunity and the evolution of group dynasties, often mani-
fested by the use of language and voice. The work of some in the field
of ‘Participatory Community Radio’ developed with various margin-
alised social groups has suggested that micro radio stations working on
an ultra-local level (while connecting to broader communities through
the internet) go some way towards establishing sonic identities for these
groups, and in so doing, for the individuals of which they are comprised.
In a world in which mass media dictates overarching easily communica-
ble public policies and cultural agenda, and the politics of communica-
tion often echoes less than humane ideals, this would seem to be one
102 S. STREET
route towards preserving the sound of personal witness that in turn

become part of the community identity, and part of group memory and
legacy.8
Market forces and their mutually supportive political agenda often
dictate mass-media policies, which place economic gain above cam-
paigning for human rights, even when they may seem to be support-
ing or promoting them. This may be observed in the case of reality
television programming, where the more sensational and controversial
aspects of voice and personality are held up to judgement and some-
times ridicule in the name of social responsibility while at the same
time, supporting corporate and commercial interests and profits. This
may appear to be separate from the journey of the sound of self, but
in fact it is intimately connected with it, subjected as we all are to the
desensitising power of alien voices discussed in chapter four, which have
the potential to override and ‘shout down’ the identity of the individ-
ual. I have discussed the early regional broadcasting experiments by the
BBC, and the social power and voice this enabled through such depart-
ments as Archie Harding’s Manchester features department. The con-
cept of regional identity, and the facilitating of that identity through
broadcasting—in particular sound broadcasting—is an important aspect
of voice and identity, in that it poses the question as to whether a
national awareness of a society’s component parts increases understand-
ing or accentuates and perpetuates stereotypes. In short, how much is
the communal/cultural identity allowed to communicate outside its
own confines?
The personal and populist sound of self and the complex sociopoliti-
cal web that constitutes the modern world in all its layered components
of ethnicity, culture and class are linked more closely than they would
seem, and it begins with a single sound at the core of the individual. The
voice in its sonic form is the conduit for the internal voice, the ‘silent’
voice that forms expression within us, and seeks communication, as
attained finally by Helen Keller through layers of physical impediment,
and liberated socially by access to technologies and forums of debate
and discussion. The physical voice is a link between us and the world;
the philosopher Mladen Dolar has said that ‘“pure enunciation” can be
taken as the red thread which connects the linguistic and ethical aspects
of the voice’ (Dolar, 103).
Resonating Chambers
Yet if our own sound is so much a part of us, what is it that shapes it
at the most primal level? Alien sound invasion may not feel welcome,
but intrusions into our sound world are a part of us too; we are given
not always what we want but what we need, and as Brandon LaBelle has
written, ‘a voice that interrupts, a figure that cuts in, a body whose force-
ful antagonism may certainly disturb…may unwittingly fulfill our desires
for cultural diversity’ (LaBelle in Stephanides and Kohlmaier, p. 90). The
relationship between our ears and our mind is the ultimate democracy,
and while the latter may ultimately make judgements based on the evi-
dence it receives, the former draws no conclusions:
To listen is to always overhear: it is to live with multiple perspectives, to

experience noise, and to deal with strangers (and strangeness) whose laugh-
ter may suddenly surprise us. In this sense, I would propose that sound, as
an event and also as a certain perspective of thought, recovers a view of the
private and the public not as distinct or separate, but rather as integrated
and interwoven. (Ibid.)
Listening as opposed to hearing opens choice for those who are able
to make it; we may choose to listen, and when we do so, we begin to
make judgements, based on the root of all sound, which is timbre. From
this, we return to our sonic likes and dislikes, voices that appeal or repel,
and sounds that engender joy or pain, sometimes in their most extreme
forms through such conditions as misophonia. Some composers have
given their works written ‘programmes’, commentaries on the meanings
intended behind the music. More often than not, these guidelines are
unsatisfactory, because the listener to a symphony engages best with the
abstract nature of the sound, rather than with a prescribed ‘storyline’.
This book began with a question—or rather a number of ques-
tions—at its source, which together might be summed up as a curios-
ity to understand if there exists within sentient beings a sympathetic
sound response system that possesses its own personal identifying ‘call
sign’, specific to each and everyone, just as every snowflake has its unique
molecular structure. Shape would seem to be the clue; in his preface to
the book-length poem The Anathemata, David Jones wrote by way of
explanation that ‘one is trying to make a shape out of the very things
of which one is oneself made’ (Jones,10). Yet such a statement is not
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an answer but merely the beginning of a new line of exploration. We

are made by culture, society, nationhood, family values and sensation,
none more dramatic than the experience of the first sound-rush of air we
experienced as birth burst us into the world and the world in turn burst
through our ears. All of this is invisible, even if the products are not.
Like sound, like music, the building blocks of our existence are ephem-
eral, transitory and intangible, elusive and mysterious. In other words,
they belong to the realms of poetic truth. John Keats, writing to his
friend Benjamin Bailey, declared that some things ‘require a greeting of
the Spirit to make them wholly exist’ (Motion, 218). Music therefore is
both a metaphor for our selves and a part of our being at the same time.
In Jacques Attali’s words, it is ‘a mirror, because as a mode of immate-
rial production it relates to the structuring of theoretical paradigms, far
ahead of concrete production. It is thus an immaterial recording surface
for human works, the mark of something missing, a shred of utopia to
decipher, information in negative, a collective memory allowing those
who hear it to record their own personalised, specified, modeled mean-
ings, affirming in time with the beat—a collective memory of order and
genealogies, the repository of the word and the social score’ (Attali in
Smith, 14).
Not all of our being is quite so elliptical; the poet-doctor, Dannie
Abse said that ‘poetry is written in the brain, but the brain is bathed in
blood’.9 Thus, we are also made in the physical sense, and so are the
sum of mind and matter, of which, as with the planet upon which we
exist, a high proportion is water, which itself interacts with elements and
lunar activity. This fact prompted the Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto to
a radical exploration of the sonic interactivity of water itself as a compo-
nent of animal life:
We start out life being 99 percent water, as foetuses. When we are born,
we are 90 percent water, and by the time we reach adulthood we are down
to 70 percent. If we die of old age, we will probably be about 50 per-
cent water. In other words, throughout our lives we exist mostly as water.
(Emoto, xv)
Emoto’s experiment was to play music under test conditions to con-

tainers of water, freeze the liquid and photograph the results under a
microscope. He claimed that the crystal shapes he observed were directly
governed by the nature of sound to which the water had been exposed.
Thus, water that had ‘listened’ to Vivaldi or Beethoven produced beau-

tiful, symmetrical forms that were themselves exquisite, while water to
which he played thrash metal music made more chaotic, formless crys-
tals. To some, it will seem extraordinary to consider that liquid is capable
of effectively making judgements of taste or value; equally, we may see
a logic in the manipulation of molecules by sonic vibration. From these
findings, Emoto drew the conclusion that the emotions and feelings felt
within humans could be related to, in David Jones’s words, quite liter-
ally, ‘the very things of which one is oneself made:’
Playing Back the Past

Whether or not we accept Emoto’s line of investigation and its conclu-
sions, we must acknowledge that sound, its creation and its memory lie
at the very core of our being. The ghostly, poignant transience of sound
as it passes us and moves on, roots us in time; much of the technology of
almost the past two hundred years has been preoccupied with the pres-
ervation of sound, and attempts at preventing it turning the page and
leaving us behind, in other words, with recording the evidence of our
previous existence. The preservation of sound has its roots in the forlorn
attempt at the preservation of life; the image of a dog listening through
an acoustic horn to his master’s voice is a poignant visual poem of mor-
tality, because the voice is a souvenir of its originator. When Edison
created the phonograph, he devised a means by which the dead could
talk to the living. While it could never be a two-way conversation, it
created the idea of a new kind of document; the word had been silent
on the page (apart from in the imagination). Now it became invisible,
but in place of its previous visibility, it was now physically audible, thus
‘the captivating possibility of sound recording was in the preservation
of sound beyond its immediate moment, extended perhaps to infinity’
(Sterne, in Smith, 306). To hear the voice of a loved one played back
after death is almost too moving for many of us to bear, and yet the idea
that the recording exists is alone a gift, something that has more power
than a photograph, because it moves through time, as did its owner,
once upon a time. It is therefore, as is all sound, existing in a sensory
present as it is heard.
When instant playback was first created for broadcast purposes in the
form of the Blattnerphone and the Marconi-Stille recording devices of
the 1930s, their near-miraculous nature was appropriated by, among
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others, the BBC radio producer Val Gielgud, with Holt Marvell in their
crime novel, Death at Broadcasting House. Recording technology seem-
ingly crossed the last frontier and enabled the self to speak as it always
had:
For a few seconds there was only the hiss of the running of the steel tape.
Then a whining cockney voice, vibrant with passion, echoed weirdly
through the darkened room. Almost furtively Caird looked around at the
faces. Which of them, he wondered, shared his own feeling of horror –
almost of incredulity – as they listened to this voice of a dead man; a man
whom most of them had seen alive and well a little over twenty-four hours
ago; and whose corpse now lay on a mortuary slab under police guard?
(Gielgud & Marvell, 44)
The sound of the self, and the voice, the ultimate interactive instrument
linking the individual and the rest of society, is a product of what we
are, and most of that is invisible, shaped as it is by thought, experience
and memory. As Nancy says: ‘Resonance is at once that of a body that
is sonorous for itself and resonance of sonority in a listening body that,
itself resounds as it listens’ (Nancy, 40). Our own personal sound con-
nects us by a transparent thread to the world; the poet and classicist
Anne Carson reminds us of how intimate that communication is: ‘Every
sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private inte-
rior yet its trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the outside’
(Carson, 130). Roland Barthes famously wrote of the ‘grain’ of voice,
rooted in what and where we have come from, ‘the materiality of the
body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter…’ (Barthes, 182)
and more specifically ‘the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it
writes, the limb as it performs’ (Ibid., 188).
We may take this further and allow ourselves the idea that the we
may perhaps leave a print of ourselves on the very objects that carry the
signals to which we listen. The American author and academic, David
Suisman, invoking questions raised by Eric Rothenbuhler and John
Durham Peters, in their article entitled ‘Defining Phonography: An
Experiment in Theory’,10 has pointed out that ‘a vinyl LP record that
has been played a hundred times sounds different—with its pop, clicks,
and surface noise—than one whose historical journey has been shorter
or less momentous. The stylus is like a plough in the furrows of the past,
churning up sounds long since buried. Each time the needle is set in
the groove, the auditor bears witness to a physical connection between

the past and the present’ (Suisman, in Stadler, 15). Likewise, to extend
this principle, I may consider that, as I have grown through the world,
a sound patina has attached itself to me; I am after all, an analog being,
and just as the needle in the groove of a disc or a cylinder picks up the
hints of past playings: scratches, dust, fingerprints and so on, time has
carved its sound on my being, as it has left its emotional marks upon my
face.
Technology has given us the means to counter time by recalling the
moment and place of previous interaction through the physical evi-
dence of its existence through sound. The irony is that technology
has also created a world in which we may feel as alone as we have ever
been; receding into our virtual worlds, even in group situations, where
we increasingly interact with others at second or even third hand, or
closing them out entirely by moving behind personal screens into elec-
tronic fantasy worlds. Through social media, we declare our ‘status’
updates to ‘friends’ who ‘follow’ us, ‘block’ us and ‘unfriend’ us often
without meeting one another at all, let alone communicating through
sound. Memory is changing too; instant access to information negates
the requirement for the process of concept learning and the evolu-
tion/development of ideas, and our brains are adjusting accordingly. It
becomes easier all the time to leap from the question to the answer with-
out experiencing the journey, so we arrive without knowing how we got
here. Further, when we do arrive, we may feel that the ‘new’ is so full of
ubiquitous shifting and progression that it has lost the ability to shock
us, to amaze us. At the same time, perhaps we may yet be susceptible to
the involuntary tremor caused by the memory of a sound when it catches
us unawares, and this may be very simple, say, a single note or the gasp
of a voice, something that awakens listening and through it, recognition.
At its most sophisticated, it takes the form of music, the power of which,
as Oliver Sacks writes, ‘whether joyous or cathartic, must steal on one
unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace’ (Sacks, 328).
‘Daventry Calling’
Yet beneath this sophistication, there lies something more primal as we
have seen. It has been noted that there is the potential for a particular
voice to dominate a power struggle through force of personality, confi-
dence and conviction conveyed through vocal dynamics, be that culture
108 S. STREET
a representation of class or knowledge. The so-called ordinary voice

becomes relegated and marginalised, and the ‘voice beautiful’ in song
and spoken word may be felt to hold a tyranny of expression that intimi-
dates and inhibits the statement of other identities, just as a perceived
‘perfect’ human face or body may earn its owner preferential visual
attention, precedence or gravitas. The natural truth—if not the societal
trend—may be seen as somewhat different. Voice is the ultimate shared
expression of the self. It is the form of expression of which all else is
an extension, and it is at its root, animal. ‘It is easy to observe,’ writes
Georges Bataille, ‘that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head
while frenetically stretching his neck so that the mouth becomes, so far
as possible, a prolongation of the spinal column…as if explosive impulses
were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, the form of
screams’.11 Bataille’s image is reminiscent of some of the paintings of
Francis Bacon and conveys an essence of a basic being that is both funda-
mental and disturbing in its primacy.
Every voice, dialect, accent and language is part of a sonic murmura-
tion that envelopes the earth, if not consciously audible, then at least as
a metaphor. It shows itself most obviously in crowded places, but even
when distant and not consciously present, it remains symbolically part of
the zeitgeist of the time. At its most basic and fundamental level, it is
manifested in the act of our breathing, and when we recognise this, we
go some way towards repairing, in Noah Pikes’s words, ‘ the artificial
separation that the classical voice has…made between the clear bright
sound and that of breath alone, carrying little or no vocal sound with
it. You hear it when sighing, yawning or whispering and it is a basic and
expressive part of our primal vocal world…It is the very life energy of
the voice itself. We recognise its importance…in the double sense of the
word “atmosphere” (breath-sphere). One meaning of psyche originally
was “breath.” In including the breath sound as an integral part of the
voice…we return psyche to voice and give it atmosphere’.12 Thus, the
sound of the self that responds is the breath of life, its formant; little
wonder that we find ourselves moved or repelled by the codes and mes-
sages the world sends us, according to personality and individual circum-
stance.
We breathe to the rhythm of our own personal drum, while sub-
tly contributing to the ongoing music of an orchestra of which we are
ourselves a member. We play our music for ourselves, and it blends
with our society, a personal identity that feeds into a community and
shapes the sound of the tribe. Egon Friedell, writing at the start of
a decade that would take sectarianism and racism to its most violent
conclusion in history, wrote: ‘there are national gods, national iden-
tities…This is the real dividing line between peoples and not race or
custom,…not politics or social structure…The god is everywhere
another god’ (Friedell, 230). We may extend Friedell’s idea to the god
in each individual, that listens, responds and speaks silently. The ‘god’
of which he speaks is the self, and in this sense, it is an idea echoed by
Joseph Campbell, who wrote of inner and out sets of ‘rules and gods,’
with a conflict between society’s governing principles that are ‘always
“out there”‘ and ‘the sense of the inward-turned meditation. There is
where the god is that is dictating to you’ (‘Creativity’ in Campbell,
152). Here is the voice at the root of things, and it speaks to us and
through us at the same time, dictating the words that express itself.
Michel de Certeau said ‘the voice makes people write’ (de Certeau,
161), but it also makes us sing, speak, think, create, interact and cru-
cially listen. We are the kin of that solitary Hawaiian bird, calling out
in the hope of an answer, sending out our call sign, awaiting recogni-
tion, a response from somewhere, as Alfred Noyse sent out his words
from the Daventry transmitter on Borough Hill, Northamptonshire in
1925:
Daventry calling…Daventry calling…
Like the bird, our sounds, whether they be words or not, can have the
capacity to express something beyond their meaning within their very
euphony, as T.S. Eliot said:
The feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious
levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most
primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something
back, seeking the beginning and the end. (Eliot, 118–119)
We each have our own call sign, station identification signal; we pos-
sess at our centre, a propensity for sound, and the instinct to share it.
Every voice, every individual behind every voice is unique, and there is
an unbroken thread that links each sonic identity from its first awareness
of sound—to the memory of the womb—through to the man or woman
who stands marginalised or neglected or unheard and tells the world:
110 S. STREET
‘listen to me’. The two-way process of communication begins with a

call, but a conversation requires there to be a response. The silent sound
heard as a book’s pages turn, the mind that accepts or rejects the mes-
sages media makes, the policy-makers and would-be leaders, the solitary
being who finds themselves dumb-struck by sickness or despair: the prin-
ciples behind these are one and the same, and the link is the sound of
self, the set of notes inside the mind that has developed and grown into
a complex fugue of thoughts, ideas and ideologies through a lifetime of
interaction. Whether or not we possess unimpaired sound faculties, the
most powerful hearing aid at our disposal is our brain.
Many years ago, the composer Pauline Oliveros created a meditation
for herself: ‘Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when
you are not listening’ (Oliveros 28). It is necessary to make the act a
conscious one, because our ears, unlike our eyes, never close, and so we
need to refocus, recalibrate their sensitivity in partnership with the mind
in order to receive signals we might otherwise miss, in other words to
locate and understand the sound under the sound. Gaston Bachelard
extends this to the silent sound of meaning, which ‘can be found if read-
ers are willing re-establish…the primacy of what is said over what is
heard’ (Bachelard, 246). This is sound interaction at its most subtle and
profound. We only receive one chance at that first passing impression of
a sound as it brushes through our mind, either physically or imagina-
tively; certainly, recording may enable us to replay it, but that can only
be a memory. The live event happens and is past, in Oliveros’s words:
‘I listen so that I may be here now even though now has already gone’
(Oliveros 249). We are what we hear, and the voice—spoken, written
and cultural—with which we seek to engage the world in interaction
affirms that. We are also made of our own sound. To communicate our
true sound is a right and a duty. It is part of the sound of our own time
and place. We might ask, what would be the voice with which we as a
species would wish to be heard by other worlds in the universe? To dwell
on that thought would be to open a debate of bewildering complexity.
For now, it is best that we begin with ourselves, listen critically, care-
fully and compassionately, and express ourselves with sound that remains
faithful to our unique human essence, part of the world, but a world in
ourselves at one and the same time. We live in the moment, and in con-
cert with the moment, we sing.
Notes
1. Pikes, Noah, ‘Giving Voice to Hell’ in Spring 55: A Journal of Archetype
and Culture. Putnam, Connecticut, 1994.
2. Toop, David, interviewed in The Sound of Fear, BBC Radio 4, 19 October
2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015zpf5 Accessed
31.12.2016.
3. Sullivan, Anne and Keller, Helen: demonstration filmed in 1930. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzlriQv16gg. Accessed 13.1.2017.
4. Raine, Kathleen, in conversation with the author, September 1994.
5. In early 2017, the US company, Canary Speech, demonstrated the devel-
opment of software in this area. See BBC News report: Can Your Voice
Reveal Whether You Have an Illness? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi-
ness-38637257, (accessed 17/1/2017).
6. Linguistics and the detailed study of the evolution of language are outside
the remit of this short book. The work of Noam Chomsky among others
has examined this area at length, and I would refer the interested reader
to such writings. Theories include such as ‘some time ago there were
primates with pretty much our sensorimotor and conceptual-intentional
systems, but no language faculty, and some natural event took place that
brought about a mutation that installed a language faculty’ (Chomsky,
62). It is an area of uncertainty and often heated debate. See also Tom
Wolfe’s attack on Darwin and in particular Chomsky. (Wolfe, 86–107).
7. Shakespeare, William: The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 3.
8. See Preston, Jon: Voice in Radio (Unpublished PhD thesis) London:
Goldsmiths, University of London, 2017.
9. Abse, Dannie, from an interview in The Observer, 3 June 1990, p. 61.
10. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. and Durham Peters, John: ‘Defining
Phonography: An Experiment in theory’, in Musical Quarterly 81,
(1997), pp. 242–264.
11. Bataille, Georges. ‘Mouth’ from Critical Dictionary and Related Texts,
originally appearing in Documents, 1929–1930, ed. George Bataille, as
included in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ed. Alaister Brotchie (London:
Atlas Press, 1995), 62–64, and quoted here in Kahn, 348.
12. Pikes.
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Index
A C
Abba, 45 Cage, John
Alzheimer’s, 100 4’33”, 31, 95
Anderson, Laurie, 9 Chomsky, Noam, 71, 87
Churchill, Winston, 53
Coppola, Francis Ford
B Apocalypse Now, 8, 29
Bachelard, Gaston
Air and Dreams, 17
The Poetics of Space, viii D
Baldwin, Stanley, 6 Daily Telegraph, 45
Barbican Arts Centre, 73 Darwin, Charles, 100, 101
BBC Daventry Transmitter, 109
features department, 9, 102 De la Mare, Walter, 13
Northern region, 86 Descartes, Rene, 38
Beatles, The, 39, 45 Doer, Anthony
Benjamin, Walter, 72 All the Light We Cannot See, 25
Berlyne, Daniel, 43 Dreyer, Carl
Black, Colin, 41 The Passion of Joan of Arc, 29
Brecht, Bertolt, 68, 74, 87
Bridson, D.G., 86, 87
Burrows, Arthur, 6 E
Edison, Thomas, 24, 105
Emoto, Masaru, 104, 105
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 119

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58676-2
120 Index
F Isserlis, Steven, 40
Facebook, 78 ITMA, 51
Freud, Sigmund, 59, 81
Friz, Anna
The Clandestine Transmissions of J
Pirate Jenny, 80 Jones, David
The Anathemata, 103
Jonson, Ben
G One Man in his Humour, 76
Gascoyne, David, 99 Joyce, William (‘Lord Haw-Haw’), 69
Gielgud, Val
Death at Broadcasting House, 106
Godwin, Fay K
Land, 81 Keats, John
Goebbels, Joseph, 69, 70 ‘To Autumn’, 26
Griessing, Otto, 69 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 20
Keller, Helen, 98, 102
Kubrick, Stanley
H 2001, A Space Odyssey, 7
Handphone Table, The (Laurie
Anderson), 83
Harding, E.A. (‘Archie’), 9, 102 L
Hardy, Thomas Lynn, Vera, 45
The Autobiography of Thomas Hardy,
6
The Return of the Native, 22 M
‘Silences’ (Poem), 13 MacColl, Ewan, 87
Hawaiian Kaua’i Bird (Moho brac- Marconi-Stille (Blattnerphone) record-
catus), 90 ing, 105
Hazlitt, William Marley, Bob, 45
The Letter-Bell McCormick, Neil, 45
Hitler, Adolf, 48, 69 Melrose Abbey, 18, 19
Holst, Gustav Mitchell, Denis, 87
Egdon Heath, 22, 23 Mix-tapes, 45
Hopkins, Gerard Manley Murch, Walter, 8, 29
‘The Habit of Perfection’, 35 Music While you Work, 50, 51
Hull, John M., 40, 58 Muzak, 77
I N
Idem-identity, 44, 45 Nazi radio broadcasts, 48, 69
Ipse-identity, 44 Non-Cochlear listening, 12, 14, 98
Index 121
Noyse, Alfred, 109 S

'The Dane Tree', x Schafer, R. Murray, 24
Schizophrenia, 62, 63
Scott, Walter
O ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, 18
Ovid Shakespeare, William
Metamorphoses, 96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 77
Owen, Wilfred King Lear, 27
‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, 26 The Merchant of Venice, 111
‘But I was Looking at Permanent Shen, Patrick
Stars’, 26 In Pursuit of Silence, 67
Oxford English Dictionary, 46 Shewring, Chu-Li, 82
Social Media, 10, 51, 71, 78, 94, 107
Stenger, Susan
P Sound Strata of Coastal
Parker, Charles, 87 Northumberland, 30, 32
Parkinson’s Disease, 100 Stravinsky, Igor
Paulin, Tom, 19 The Rite of Spring, 40
Piette, Adam, 23 Sullivan, Anne, 98
Pikes, Noah, 4, 94, 108
Pinter, Harold, 28, 88
Pound, Ezra, 69 T
Priestley, J.B. Tavener, John
Postscript, 52 The Protecting Veil, 40
Proust, Marcel Thatcher, Margaret, 73
In Search of Lost Time, 62 Thomas, Dylan
Under Milk Wood, 15, 21
Thomas, Edward
R Oxford, 68
Radio Ballads, The, 87 In Pursuit of Spring, 68
Radio Times, ix Twitter, 71, 78
Raine, Kathleen, 99
Reith, John, 6, 42
Broadcast Over Britain, ix V
Ricoeur, Paul, 44 Volksempfänger (‘People’s Radio’), 69
Robinson, Tim
Connemara, 59
Rodenburg, Patsy, 73, 76, 78, 79, 85 W
Royal National Theatre, 73 Watson, Chris, 9
Welles, Orson
War of the Worlds (Radio broadcast),
88, 90
122 Index
Wells, H.G.
The Shape of Things to Come, 86
The War of the Worlds (Book), 14, 79
Williams, William Carlos, viii, ix
Wolfson, Alfred, 4, 5
Wordsworth, William, 5, 63
Wundt, Wilhelm
‘U-Shaped Curve’, 43
‘Wundt Curve’, 43

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PALGRAVE STUDIES

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Sound

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944179

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Here, observed Bachelard, was a realm of thinking where the tradi-

either in the foreground, or as a distant but ever-present background

When we attempt to deal with ether we are immediately involved in the

Poole, UK Seán Street

It is a pleasure to offer my thanks to friends and colleagues who have

Liverpool, UK  Seán Street

1 Poetry and the Idea of Sound  1

2 Silent Sound: Imagination and Identification  17

3 Transmitters and Receivers: Shared and Selected Sound  37

4 Invasion of the Sound Aliens  57

5 Uncomfortably Numb: Alone in the Sound World  75

6 Searching for the Sound of Self  93

Poetry and the Idea of Sound

Abstract Sound exists because it is made and because it is heard. ‘The

Keywords Sound inside us · Identity · Written v. spoken text

The Sound of Self

© The Author(s) 2017 1

uncontrollably, my daughter sought to alleviate her distress. Having

yielded – hence also made public – when we listen to a voice, an instru-

William Wordsworth saw something deeply mystical in the birth of con-

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come… 1

Wordsworth’s view as expressed in his great ode, ‘Intimations of

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy…

Be that as it may, our first task on arrival—after the necessity of survival—

While we may have these written—if not actually sonic—witnesses to the

of language. A scream of pain needs no words of explanation to express

Choice and no Choice

ideologies and other forms of indoctrination bombard us constantly. We

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it

Thus, these ‘sound aliens’ may be ignored, absorbed, interacted with or

purposes, motivations and sound sources; these translate into a sound-

Soundless in the Sonic World

mentally seeking a reason for, yet which absorbs our consciousness. It

…the rapt silence of an empty house

Likewise, in ‘The Listeners’, Walter de la Mare has his protagonist stand-

there?’—were echoed in a different context in Orson Welles’s famous

The Invention of Self

the conclusions drawn from a century of mass and self-destruction were

song or a radio programme or a conversation. Technology has provided

Silent Sound: Imagination

Abstract Silent sound surrounds us in our daily life, a bubble of inter-

Keywords Internal sound · Poetic images · Words as sound

© The Author(s) 2017 17

If though wouldst view fair Melrose aright,

Go visit it by the pale moonlight;

For the gay beams of lightsome day

Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey.

When the broken arches are black in night,

And each shafted oriel glimmers white;

When the cold light’s uncertain shower

Streams on the ruin’d central tower;

When buttress and buttress, alternately,

Liverpool, UK Seán Street

1 Poetry and the Idea of Sound 1

2 Silent Sound: Imagination and Identification 17

3 Transmitters and Receivers: Shared and Selected Sound 37

4 Invasion of the Sound Aliens 57

5 Uncomfortably Numb: Alone in the Sound World 75

6 Searching for the Sound of Self 93

Poetry and the Idea of Sound

Abstract  Sound exists because it is made and because it is heard. ‘The

Keywords  Sound inside us · Identity · Written v. spoken text

The Sound of Self

Choice and no Choice

Soundless in the Sonic World

The Invention of Self

Abstract  Silent sound surrounds us in our daily life, a bubble of inter-

Keywords  Internal sound · Poetic images · Words as sound

— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Transmitters and Receivers: Shared

Abstract  Technologies—media—interact with the mind in its sound-

Keywords  Radio · Tribal Sounds · Anthems · Group Identity