What does soundscape research do?

---

Soundscapes: “a total appreciation of the acoustic environment” (Schafer 1994)

After reading a lot about Anthropology’s new research interest in soundscapes here and here and mentioning it briefly here, I became more interested in the practical aspects of soundscape research in anthropology. The importance of rethinking and including sonorous aspects of cultural life in anthropological research was clear to me but what could that research actually focus on? What are interesting questions that could be asked? And how can the findings from research contribute to a more insightful conception of sound (outside of academia)?

I stumbled upon a European network of scientist and researchers that aim at bringing together research projects dealing with soundscapes. This network is called ‘Soundscape of European Cities and Landscapes’ and covers research in many academic disciplines such as psychology, architecture, anthropology and medicine. What all these projects have in common is that – as opposed to the noise policy that has been carried out by the EU – the research projects from this particular network focus on environmental sounds as a ‘resource rather than a waste’ and consider cultural differences in soundscapes.

Policy is aimed at measuring noise levels and controlling or reducing noise levels in order to meet targets and limits for exposure. What isn't addressed is the issue of the sounds we want to hear. What makes sounds attractive or unattractive? Can we find out? Then can we develop ways of measuring sound quality rather than noise? Ultimately can we design desirable soundscapes in the same way that we design buildings, lighting or landscape effects in urban areas?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any details on specific projects or details on how these questions are approached, especially by the anthropologists involved. I would like to know more about the methodologies employed by the anthropologists and how they contribute to an enhanced understanding of soundscapes. Do they limit their research to traditional field recordings and qualitative methods or do they work with sound and editing technologies in new ways?

I will certainly try to find out more about ongoing research in this particular area.

Ethnography is about experience

---

New approaches in ethnography strengthen the importance of material and sensory aspects of the world anthropologists observe. A prominent endeavor into new modes of experimentation with sensory ethnography are the media projects of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab. What do all these projects contribute to ethnography? Are these experimentations worth anything in the depiction of reality or are they simply abstractions and individual interpretations? I want to take a very brief look at why I think that experimentation with media is not only helpful but also necessary for ethnography.

Photo: http://sel.fas.harvard.edu/works.html

Doing ethnography is an attempt at capturing the unique realities of people's lives by experiencing these lives as closely as possible. By the practice of experience I refer to a certain state of awareness, of 'being there' and seeing, feeling, tasting and listening to the things that happen around us. 'Knowledge is gained through cultural immersion'. How much of this knowledge is lost when ethnographers produce textual representation of the physical world they experienced? How much 'experience' can a textual approach even represent if experience itself is known to be multi sensory?

A textual approach might focus on the meaning people create and attribute to the world they experience. But wouldn't we, as readers of ethnographies, first want to gain a sense of what their world feels like? I would argue that people create meaning based on what they experience – not what they experience individually, but rather what they experience intersubjectively as humans in interaction with the physical world. Trying to convey a sense of this group experience should be the first duty for every ethnographer and the first step in any attempt of depicting the culture's practices and knowledge. Here, experimentation with sound and images can offer ways of depicting these experiences, especially if the ethnography is concerned with bodily aspects of cultural life or people's perceptions of environment.

Is anthropology art or science?

---

In this previous blog post about the relationship between anthropology and art I quoted Susan Hiller, an academic that left the field of anthropology to become an artist in order to escape ‘the writing of a doctoral thesis whose objectification of the contrariness of lived events was destined to become another complicit thread woven into the fabric of ‘evidence’ that would help anthropology become a ‘science’’. Hiller thinks that anthropology cannot be science. In that same post I asked if anthropologists can pick up on Hillers thoughts without giving up anthropology in its entirety. I want to go back to this question and consider Carrithers paper on the question 'Is Anthropology art or science?'

First of, I think it’s quite interesting to see that Carrithers doesn’t seem to be very interested in the ‘art’ part of his question. That said, I think his question is misleading in that the paper makes no effort in considering the assumption that anthropology might be, in fact, art. Nonetheless, there are some overlapping points that both Hiller and Carrithers make that I would like to examine.

To begin with, there might be some important differences in the understanding of science of both. The way I understand Hillers critical view on science is that she thinks of it as a tightly woven fabric, a firm foundation whereupon facts should rest on. Anthropology, as the study of the human world (including art) on the other hand fails at creating ‘science’ because it has to interact with the people involved on a personal base in order to make sense of the world they live in and gather meaningful experiences of their world. Thus, the objectivity attributed to ‘science’ limits the anthropologists in revealing the nature of the realities studied. 

Carrithers, though, is well aware of the problems that such claims of objectivity bring. What Carrithers proposes is an understanding of science that is measured not by the absolute certainty of the knowledge it creates but rather by its ‘usefulness within specific human practices’. So the question shouldn’t be if the collected data from ethnographic fieldwork is absolutely true, but if it one could act appropriately in the field with the knowledge that one gained.

What I find interesting about this is that both Hiller and Carrithers come to similar conclusions. However, It should be noted that Hiller explicitly refers to the study of art in anthropology, while Carrithers paper is concerned with the general study of the human world. Regardless of these differences both stress the importance of interaction in the study of the human. Hiller thinks that ‘art exists primarily in its relationship to the viewer who must participate in it, intimately experience it’. Similarly, Carrithers claims that ‘we cannot seek an absolutely correct, unequivocal, "scientific" understanding of such mental states apart from interaction, for it is only interaction that gives them sense’. Precisely because of its nature as a human activity, science is unable to generate absolute truths alienated from the ‘world of human practice’. In this sense Hiller, as an artist, and Carrithers, as an anthropologists, might agree on more than I thought.

So, where can art be located in all this?

soundscapes

---

'[Sound] is a great source of knowledge because hearing enables you to gather information, to appreciate, to have a response to the environment. But then so does seeing, smelling, touching, feeling, tasting. Sound is very important but it's not the only thing that is important. More and more it interests me how our senses interact to create our composite or our whole feeling.'

Peter Cusack is a field recording artist. He examines soundscapes and uses sound as a way of documenting places. I find Cusacks sound maps  especially interesting because they seem like an interesting contribution to ethnography.

http://favouritesounds.org
http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/

The creativity of copying

---

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zdepth/8217513543/

Cars were invented, toasters and scissors were invented. When they were invented, they seemed useful and specific tasks were made easier or maybe even possible in the first place. Most people would be inclined to say that these were innovations and that their creation was a truly creative act because it required thinking ‘outside the box’, and explore possibilities beyond the ones that had already been exploited. In the case of the invention of the car one could even add that it marked a ‘unique moment of radical disjuncture’, because its coming into existence changed the way of modern life and triggered new processes. Manufacturing a car today means reproducing conventional models of engineering and it’s not seen as a creative process unless it involves the making of some sort of ‘new’ design or technology. Thus, creativity produces novelty. This is they way most people, including anthropologists like John Liep, understand creativity and innovation.

Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam disagree with this view and ascribe this notion of novelty and invention to a so called ‘backwards reading of modernity’. They challenge the polarity between innovation and convention and the belief that ‘nothing is created that was not designed in advance’. To say that innovation is creativity means to look at the outcome, the final product and judge it in terms of its non-conformity to convention. According to this logic, manufacturing a car that replicates an existing model is just an act of imitation. However, what Ingold and Hallam suggest is to look at the process rather than the result. By doing so, we can realize that reproducing and copying takes ‘effort, attention and even problem-solving’ because maintaining an established convention means to accommodate a fixed model to the realities of an inconstant and ever-changing world. This forward reading shows that creativity does not equal innovation but improvisation. If we look at a car that has just been manufactured and deem it a copy of an existing model, then it’s only because we look at the finished product and see the resemblance between the copy and the model. But this resemblance, they suggest, is ‘an outcome of the process’ and ‘not given in advance’. Manufacturers had to improvise and adapt to new challenges to make an exact copy of the model. They had to be creative.

Is adjustment creativity? While this view seems perfectly plausible within its logic, to me, it seems like a difficult concept to grasp when applied to practical examples. To accept the act of imitation as creativity seems particularly hard because it requires breaking out of the scheme of ‘backwards reading’ that is so deeply rooted in all areas of modern society. The ‘forward reading’ is not only challenging our established concept of creativity but it also confronts us with a possibly faulty concept of the human imagination, which we think of as free from the ‘determinations of both nature and society’.