Experiencing Sound, page 1
Experiencing Sound
Experiencing Sound
THE SENSATION OF BEING
Lawrence Kramer
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2024 by Lawrence Kramer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kramer, Lawrence, author.
Title: Experiencing sound : the sensation of being / Lawrence Kramer.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023057042 (print) | LCCN 2023057043 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520400849 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520400856 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sounds—Philosophy. | Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. | Sounds—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC B105.S59 K725 2024 (print) | LCC B105.S59 (ebook) | DDC 121/.35—dc23/eng/20240109
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057042
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057043
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. June 24, 2019: The Wind on Mars
2. Listening for the Llamas
3. Auditory Epiphanies
4. Sound and World
5. Listening to Silence
6. Calm Sea: Going Nowhere, Hearing Nothing
7. Prisons of Silence
8. Just One Sound
9. Song and Sound
10. Already Music
11. Coming Alive
12. The Vocal Telegraph
13. The Ravished Ear
14. Campaniles
15. Cannonades
16. Soundless Hearing
17. The Talking Dead
18. From Sounds to Sound
19. Fictitious Sounds
20. Bells
21. Dis/Embodiment
22. Threads
23. Playback
24. Shorthand
25. Poems to Music
26. Grooves
27. Grooves II: Spacing
28. Beyond Analogy
29. Phonogram and Gramophone
30. Forest Murmurs
31. Epithet
32. Mesmerizing Sound
33. Cathay
34. Night. A Street. No Lamps.
35. The Resonating Cure
36. The Voice of Language
37. Nocturne. Another City.
38. Annals of Slavery: A Violin
39. The Grammar of Uncertainty
40. Aftersounds
41. Persistence of Hearing
42. Annals of Slavery II: A Vigil
43. A Voice in a Box
44. The Contralto Mystique: Intercession
45. The Contralto Mystique II: Departure
46. Two Lynchings
47. “White Christmas”: Saigon, 1975
48. The Ghetto: New York, 1904
49. Testimony
50. Voice
51. Inner Speech
52. The Deafness of Narcissus
53. Sound in the Making
54. Housewarming
55. Language Dead or Alive
56. Hearing Plato’s Cave
57. Speaking and Being
58. Minding the Senses
59. LP: Longplayer
60. Harmonies of the World
61. Uneven Measures
62. Sound, Finitude, Music
63. The Shards of the Infinite
64. A Passing Synthesis
65. Aeolian Visitations
66. Harmonizing
Notes
Index
Preface
This book grew out of my increasing awareness, over many years of writing about music and also composing it, that music is made of sound. The fact may seem perfectly obvious, but it has perhaps been too obvious for its own good. Our customary ways of thinking about music pay too little heed to it. Because music disappears in the act of being made or heard, we cling to the vestiges it leaves behind. What reaches our ears as a passing sensation ends up in our minds as a fictional object. Grasping the object, we mute the sound, even in the act of describing it. There is probably no way to avoid this altogether, but there is a way to get beyond it. We can learn to hear music as a temporary cut in a vast continuous flow of sound. Once we do that, the concepts of both sound and music undergo substantial change. The boundaries between them blur. It becomes possible, and comes to feel necessary, to listen to the flow of sound as we listen to music and to hear in music the flow of sound at work.
My previous study of sound, The Hum of the World, makes a start on that listening and that hearing. The book is guided by the aphorism that sound is the measure of life. It gathers evidence for the essential vitality of sound from numerous sources ancient and modern, including music, philosophy, science, and literature. Experiencing Sound adopts the same premise and continues the effort to give sound its due. It also, as it must, moves in new directions, two of them in particular:
First, sound in these pages is understood not just as something we sense but as something we need. The need is not practical, though it is that, too, but existential, ontological. Sound is the medium we dwell in. It is the one sense we cannot cease to use.
Second, sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops. If sound is the measure of life, its end must be a measure of death. The delicate balance of vitality and mortality is a recurrent theme in the reflections to follow.
If “reflections” is the right word. I’m not sure we have the right vocabulary to describe the kind of book this is, though the book’s form is hardly novel. It is modeled on the loose assembly of observations, thoughts, interpretations, and the like found, for example, in the writings of three of my favorite thinkers: Nietzsche, the later Wittgenstein, and Barthes. Such writing embodies a form of thinking equally devoted to the demands of reasonable argument and the necessity for conceptual and verbal invention, for metaphor, provocation, and risk. There is also a personal element which should be understood as a genuine conceptual resource. As to what to call the various entries, I suppose “reflections” or “observations” will have to do, but perhaps they are better thought of as forays, forays in the sense of ventures, but even to some degree in the military sense, what T. S. Eliot called “raids on the inarticulate.” Perhaps the foray should be recognized as a genre of thought.
Like The Hum of the World, Experiencing Sound can be read more or less at random. The brevity and the principle of the forays see to that. Some threads run through adjoining segments; others recur at wider intervals. But in keeping with its theme of passing time, Experiencing Sound follows a long arc. The ideal way to read it may be straight through. Reader’s choice, as always.
Introduction
Sound in recent years has escaped its traditionally subordinate relationship to sight and become the object of widespread interest. Sound studies is a flourishing field. Much of the work done under this rubric has concentrated either on the technological history of sound or on the social uses and abuses of sound.1 In my book The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (2019), I sought to focus on the ways in which sound has been imagined and represented in Western culture.2 The meaning of sound depends on how it is apprehended. We need the work on technology and social impact, but we also need work on how sound has been experienced—felt, remembered, and conceived. More attention is still needed to the way sound frames our relationship to the world and forms the measure of life. Of course there is a great deal of overlap among sonic spheres of interest. But to be very clear: sound as studied here is auditory rather than acoustic. It is fully material but always mediated by human sensation, perception, feeling, and understanding. It is sound as lived.
If we think of hearing as an involuntary physical event and of listening as purposive, we might say that the primary condition of sound is the transformation of hearing into listening. (This would be true of any creature with ears.) The process is continuous, so much so that the distinction on which it is based melts away more often than not. This transformation is not just something that happens but something we do. It is a fundamentally creative process that goes beyond its social, physical, and material sources. It is how we live with sound and live through sound and it is the subject raised in The Hum of the World and continued here.
The Hum of the World is grounded in a new concept and in a principle associated with it. The concept is the hum of my title, which also, for convenience, goes by the name of the audiable—the word audible enriched with a resonant extra vowel sound. The audiable is the faint continuous background sound that accompanies all of our sensory perception. This sound on rare occasions becomes perceptible and meaningful. Most of the time it hovers on the fringes of perception where, however, it does essential work for us. It forms a barrier against total silence, dead silence, a condition that we rarely experience and that disturbs us greatly when we do. When the world goes totally silent, we often listen to our bodies instead, the pulse in our veins, the air in our lungs. We need to hear something.
The continuity of the audiable assures us of the continuity of our experience of the world, which is to say, the continuation of life. This is the principle that goes with the concept. The audiable is not only a sound yo
For sound is always directed toward the future. It starts just before it is heard but it is heard in the passage from now to next that constitutes the immediate present. Its link to the future is so strong that sound is the sensory medium in which the awareness of coming time is felt. More particularly, sound is the sensory medium in which the awareness of continuing life is felt. Although we customarily speak of looking into the future, in practical everyday terms what we do is listen to the future arriving. The audiable is the felt promise of sound, of more sound, and therefore, most fundamentally, of more life.
We do not normally hear the audiable in the usual sense of “hear,” but it is a genuine auditory phenomenon within the sense of hearing. For a visual analogy, we might turn to things seen best when we concentrate on them mentally but observe them only from the corner of the eye, with peripheral vision. Such averted vision makes faint objects more discernible. The star cluster known as the Pleiades offers a good example. It is almost invisible if you try to stare at it, but evocatively present if you look askance. The audiable is usually best observed with what we might call averted hearing. Its presence resonates through other sounds at or near the threshold of audibility that temporarily blend with it.
If these faint sounds hover over what we listen to, they form an aura or haze that merges with the universal background. If the sounds are exposed so we hear them falling away, we can also hear the hum of the world rising to take them in. For a passing moment we can catch the tone of the audiable. Another visual analogy may prove helpful. The ephemeral sound is like a drop of dye falling into a glass of water. For a moment the water takes on a swirl of coloration; one can see its liquidity; then the color dissipates and the water’s translucency returns, a little altered. Because sound, unlike sight, has the capacity to ebb and flow, it often attracts metaphors of running or falling water. This affinity is so close that it is hard to think of sound without it. The analogy to the drop of dye may be colorful but it is not entirely visual; it speaks to the auditory undercurrent of experience.
The audiable has a rich but largely neglected history in Western thought, science, and art dating from the late classical era if not before. Once we begin to seek them out, the workings of the audiable and the articulation of life through sound turn up everywhere. They make available kinds of knowledge and pleasure that have been veiled—everywhere—by the normative domination of the visual as the medium of understanding. And “everywhere” is the point, because the audiable is essential to our sense of connection with reality. The audiable is not something we hear because it is there. It is something that is there because we hear it.
Henry James’s novel The American, written in 1876, offers a literally striking example. In the course of making a new friend, the novel’s hero hears something—hears something—in the face he looks at: “The great point in his face was that it was intensely alive—frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. The look of it was like a bell, of which the handle might have been in the young man’s soul: at a touch of the handle it rang with a loud silver sound.”3
Two aspects of this description are especially noteworthy. First, the measure of the face’s intense aliveness is an imaginary sound. The resonance of the bell extends the general sense of aliveness into vivid particulars: frankness, ardor, gallantry. The young man’s face is experienced through an auditory gaze. Second, because the sound is a bell sound, its silver ring has a quality that we can attend to as a metaphor and also listen to in the mind’s ear. The sound is one that will linger first and then gradually fade until it reaches, then crosses, the threshold of audibility. When it reaches that threshold, it merges into the general background of all hearing for which The Hum of the World is named.
A more recent illustration occurs in Anthony Doerr’s short story “The Caretaker.” The protagonist, an African immigrant in California, tries at one point to imagine what it must be like to be deaf. Frustrated by his failures to understand the cultural and racial cues addressed to him, he decides to shut them out. He supposes—incorrectly—that deafness consists of “a kind of void, a nothingness, an oblivion.” But when he tries to deafen himself by clamping his hands over his ears, he fails, and fails necessarily: “There is always noise, the flux and murmur of his body’s machinery, a hum in his head.”4
This description traces a subtle progression. Noise is external and meaningless; the flux and murmur of the body’s machinery is internal and meaningful. The body as machinery may feel alienated, but the listener knows how the machinery works, and the movement from flux to murmur arrives at the threshold of speech. From there the progression moves to the hum in the head, which is pervasive and indeterminate. Is it internal or external? Is it the hum of impending thought or language or something else? Whatever it is, it fills the space between the ears, the seat of the sense of hearing. The hum is in the protagonist’s head but not necessarily of it. Like the sound of James’s bell it merges into the hum of the world. And in so doing it blocks him—saves him—from the oblivion he seeks.
But what if the listener had actually been deaf? It must be acknowledged that this book assumes the perspective of a hearing person, and that the heard world is its subject. The same goes for The Hum of the World. I do not presume to speak for the deaf community, but it is nonetheless clear that sound plays a fundamental role in the lives of the deaf. But it plays that role on their terms. Music, especially, is a part of deaf culture, grasped by means of vibration, touch, rhythm, and a form of singing in which the hands, signing, with a style and rhythm of their own, do the work that the voice cannot do. More generally, where the ears stop, the body opens other channels for sound.5 The true exception to the rule of sound may come from hearing not too little but too much: from tinnitus, ringing in the ears; from hyperacusis, the perception of all sound as too loud; or from misophonia, an inexplicable aversion to specific sounds. Sometimes we are at the mercy of our ears.
• • • • •
This sequel to The Hum of the World is a slowly cumulating series of short studies. In continuing to ask how we apprehend sound in a multitude of settings, it keeps returning, almost as if involuntarily, to the effects of sound on the experience of being finite: exposed, vulnerable, transient. The guiding thread is the need I spoke of earlier, the need to hear something rather than nothing. Sound makes life audible, says The Hum of the World, and so says the hum that is its namesake. Being audible belongs to the very concept of life. But this audibility, says Experiencing Sound, is more than simply a phenomenon to enjoy or ponder. It is the answer to a demand, an imperative, an urge. Its value goes beyond pleasure and knowledge, though it may bring both. There are times when sound is not only the measure of life but also the means of upholding it. It may be a lifeline for an enslaved person hidden for seven years in a crawlspace; it may be the lifespan of a musical work meant to play continuously for a thousand years. Both cases appear in these pages along with many others.
Like The Hum of the World, Experiencing Sound seeks to show that following the thread of sound can change our understanding of history, language, feeling, and sensation. But Experiencing Sound goes a step further by threading in the need for sound as an essential dimension of our experience of it. The need is always there. It does not matter whether the experience is blissful or terrible. That we need sound does not always mean we can endure it. It may merit praise not for what it gives but for what it reveals. Still, as some of the entries below should illustrate, there are times and circumstances in which meeting the need for sound is what makes life livable.
Sound does in the world of the senses what telling stories does in the world of thought: it helps us make sense of living in time. Sense and sensation cross and mingle; a story implies a voice and sounds have tales to tell. This is both an everyday matter—the different hours have their different sounds—and one that carries over long, sometimes very long, spans. Whatever the time, the need hums along. Quiet may be sought, but silence must be broken.
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