Category: Contemporary Issues in Sound Arts

In my dissertation, I address the folklore problem that happened in Portugal, which held many people in the bonds of the Estado Novo. After spending an entire week listening to Michel Giacometti’s seemingly endless work, I made the creative decisions necessary to develop a sound piece cohesively connected to the topic I addressed in my essay. Giacometti allowed the emancipation of the people through recording and listening in this way. Intellectuals came to have a broader social conscience. They were taught to listen to the programmes launched by RTP and were able to make their critical interpretations of the world in which they lived from 1970-to 74.

In my sound piece, I invite the listener to travel through countless field recordings, juxtaposed, that have no reference to the moment, nor the area of the country, nor to an objective context, but involve them in an immersive human and warm experience. We hear the voices of the works. We listen to the women in tune and often in dystonia. We listen to a panoply of anthrophonies, biophonies and geophonies, as true sonic journalism should be done. 

https://soundcloud.com/notabutabu/giacometti?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

I am not entirely dazzled by the work I have achieved. There is a lot to do yet. There were a lot of creative dilemmas to solve. Firstly, I thought of putting together all the selected moments from the filmography and making a kind of turntablism. I inserted different audio on different audio tracks, from mere field recordings to Giacomettian recordings. The idea would be to mix them into a performance that I would record. Unfortunately, it failed. The poorly recorded result remained, and the process slowed down what could have been the initial solution – editing. Editing ethnomusicological work is not an idea I like. I felt it would lose the whole mystique of the performance. However, it didn’t fail as drastically as I thought it would, and it turned out to have a compensatory result. 

I also had the idea of recording it on a Nagra IV-S, the same one Giacometti used, hoping to romanticise the process and make the piece even more epic and praiseworthy. I dismissed the idea due to a lack of resources and expertise, but I don’t disregard it for the near future. A Nagra IV-S in my hands would make me feel what many sonic journalists felt – the pressure of not having enough tape, the suspense of not having a quality recording, among other concerns I am unaware of. In a final thought on tape recorders, I would like to discuss in the future what the inherent creative impediments of both typical sound recorders – analogue and digital – are in a similar context to Giacometti.

Returning to my piece, it contained around 20 samples, all of which came from the work recorded by the Corsican, except for the final moments where I dramatise the culmination of the piece by introducing the idea that the tape has run out, with sounds and drawing by me. What does it symbolise? Well, it is an ode. An ode and a summary of everything I know about this man’s work which I hold so dear. The samples in question are also all from the People Who Sing series, as they are the only ones I have in my range, excluding The Net Wing. They are:

1. Fragments of a musical enquiry in Penha Garcia (1971)
2. The viola campaniça and the despique in Baixo Alentejo (1971)
3. Work songs (1972)
4. Work songs II (1972)
5. The Stone – Póvoa de Lanhoso (1973)
6. Workshops, Estorãos (Ponte de Lima) (1973)
7. Workshops, São Martinho (Ponte da Barca) (1973)
8. O alar da rede (1962)

After several listens to Giacometti’s work, I feel I am an expert. I know a great deal of his work – it would be impossible to know everything completely, so I can identify what kind of recordings are interesting to my ear. After the class I took with Mark Peter-Wright on how to drag one sound to another, I was very inspired to manipulate the work of the ethnomusicologist to another level. What kind of considerations might a piece that manipulates someone else’s work have? How can I justify my ideas through editing? For the moment, I recognise that my intention regarding Giacometti’s work is to perpetuate his work and praise him. This obsession seems endless; it will become even more eternal by revealing concepts like repetition, juxtaposition, and extension in a sound piece. I don’t want to damage the subject’s voices. But I want to raise them to other levels of understanding. When we mix two Chitas (singers of traditional Beira music who became famous with Giacometti’s recordings), what can happen? What can happen when, apart from the Cheetahs, we put the masons of Lanhoso to the noise? And the campaniça guitar? And the norias? And the wind? And the hoes? And the tiredness of men? And the fishermen of Portimão? And the wool handlers? And the ladies’ songs? What sound projection could all this amalgam of sounds have?

In class with Mark, I was dazzled by the work of Maria Chavez, whom I already knew but had never connected with Peter Cusack’s sonic journalism. In essence, this pairing is a kind of archival journalism, which alludes a bit to the work of Syma Tariq. Is it possible, without speech, to demonstrate the social problems of fascist Portugal in such a piece? What if I fail? What if I fail to achieve my goal? I believe that such wisdom can only be achieved by doing! In another class with Mark, I learned that with practice, you realise, reminding me of Francis Alÿs’ work El Ensayo, where a car tries consecutively to cross a hill but fails and turns back.

It is essential to recognise that perhaps Giacometti’s best field recordings are undoubtedly the Working Songs. This is for a simple reason – music is no longer the ethnomusicologist’s main reason for collecting. There is a social issue surrounding the recording. The social reality cannot be denied, just as in post-World War II neorealism. In front of our ears, we can consider thousands of reasons for judging a society. For example, the men pounding the stone in Póvoa do Lanhoso was done the same way a century ago. However, we are in the middle of the second half of the 21st century, and here they are, the last specimens of that sound register, which most probably in other societies would already be extinct. They are sounds that seem from a very distant past but were actually recorded 50 years ago. Nowadays, these same sounds no longer exist. They exist performed in case the elderly person who knows how to break the stone in that way is asked.

What is my research interest for this project?

• acoustemology
• politics of the voice
• music and conflict 
• ethnographic methodologies review.

Mark Peter

He’s interested in the relationship between humans, animals, and technology and the power in that triad. Also interested in pedagogy – figure stuff out together. He works within different media: installation, performance and radio. Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice is his upcoming book. 

Questions for the class:

• What artistic histories might your sound work connect with
• How will narrative function
• How will voice function
• What type of editing does your content demand
• Where are you at work?

Analysis of Hildegard Westerkamp work Kitts Beach Soundwalk

• voice is the command of a change in the piece
• playing with truth and fiction
• “recording sound is subjective” Westerkamp.
• Poetic doc.

Analysis of Glenn Gould Contrapuntal Radio/Editing

• polyphony of voice as an editing technique

What type of audio editor am I?

• I don’t know 

Analysis of Irv Tiebel’s The Altered Nixon Speech

• Cut up/Truth/Fiction
• “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”
• hubristic

Maria Chavez: Live/Performance

James Benning: no editing at all

The Noisy-Nonself or I, the Thing in the Margins by Mark Peter Right

http://markpeterwright.net/the-noisynonself-or-i-the-thing-in-the-margins

Sonic Journalism

• Based on the idea that all sound, including non-speech, gives information about places and events. This does not exclude speech but redresses the balance towards the relevance of other sounds. Listening provides valuable insights in different forms but is complementary to visual images and language.

https://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/sonic-journalism/

• who’s currently recording the war in Ukraine?

• Syma Tariq: sonic journalism but with archive

Listening Protocol: Editing Interviews and Environments for Broadcast.

1st Program – Fragments of a musical inquiry in Vila Verde de Ficalho (Lower Alentejo – 9th of August 1971

This is the first complete episode I see of any made by Giacometti. Before, I only watched fragments available on Youtube of displaced episodes. Giacometti is seen before the interviewee, asking questions in an inquest format (name, age, homeland, etc.). You can see the whole team of RTP around the place: people from the city, dressed in the latest fashion, while António da Assunção Lopes, the subject under review, and another compadre hanging there, dressed in old, dark and antiquated clothes. We are in Via Verde de Ficalho, land of the Baixo Alentejo (Serpa, Beja).

Still, about the production, we observe situations of social consciousness that, although almost insignificant and insignificant, are, in the eyes of an academic and enthusiast of others that such as the case of Stephen Feld, of great importance. They constitute a symbolic immensity for the whole of production and the entire political-social context of the early 70s. It symbolises the participation of the people in the practical realisation of the freedom of speech (perhaps) so necessary at that time. Antonio’s companion is one of the actors who allows the recording of the subject’s voice. Along with the members of RTP, he will enable the extension of the cable of Nagra IV-s (analogue tape label).

At the same time, I wonder about the editorial intentions of the image and sound assembler: there were some “silences”, the recordings were kept complete, listening to the old-fashioned metal machinery rubbing the earth and itself, frogs, steps… It’s not just the voice. It’s all that sounds. That is, it legitimises the natural environment of that record.

"Moda da Lavoura" (Farming Moda, moda is a way of singing) of Vila Verde de Ficalho, performed by António da Assunção Lopes


Nestes campos solitários
Onde a desgraça me tem,
Brado, ninguém me responde,
Olho, não vejo ninguém.

A vida do almocreve
É uma vida arriscada,
Ao descer uma ladeira,
Ao cerrar uma carrada!

Translation:

In these lonely fields
Where misfortune has me,
I shout, no one answers me,
I look, I see no one.

The life of the almocreve*
It’s a risky life,
Going down a hill,
Close up a bunch!

*almocreve: "Cargo-carrying individual (whether or not on periodic journeys)."(Dicionário, 2022).

2nd Program – Santa Cruz celebration in Aldeia da Venda: Upper Alentejo – August 23, 1971.

“In this atmosphere, as if emerging outside the present time, an orchestra from the neighbourhood attacks, without transition, a pop song: the youth prepares for a country dance, which will last the night away.” (Giacometti, 1971).

This is the same celebration nowadays. Still resisting.

3rd Program – Fragments of an inquiry in Salir: Algarve, 6th of September 1971

Beautiful program! Nothing is more beautiful than seeing the people in improvisation, failure and repetition. It is the genuineness of culture free from folklorisation. In this episode recorded in Salir, a man whose function already refers to hidden times immerses the people in hallucinations told of things never lived and misrepresented experiences. But the freedom of expression is reflected in him. RTP gave him this opportunity, and Giacometti heard it. On the other hand, José de Sousa, who had travelled through the ethnomusicologist lands, failed to play the mischievous travessa flute and lamented its insufficient and worn technique.

However, the relevance centres on recording the tale, which Alfredo, who was in front of Salir’s people sitting on the stairs, understood to roll the tape and record as much as he could. Today, decisions like this are seen as easy. In the 1970s, there was a budget for everything, and indeed, film tape had its limits. Alfredo Tropa, then the visual director of Giacometti’s ethnographic decisions, decided to take this experience to the air and make it tangible for all Portuguese people.

4th Program – A Oração das Almas em São Bento do Ameixial (Translation: The Souls Prayer in São Bento do Ameixial): Upper Alentejo – 20th of November 1972

The ephemerality of traditions. The inability to continue. In the end, Giacometti comments, “It is necessary and urgent that the systematic collection of our regional music is processed between us and by all available means. By losing the physiognomic traits of our musical tradition, we will have consciously obliterated and forever, living portions of a reality that our people express with strength and truth. If this is the case, it is clear that any future analysis of this same reality must necessarily lead to serious shortcomings to the detriment of this truth.” (Giacometti, 1972).

References:

In: Priberam Dicionário. 2022. Almocreve. [online] Priberam. Available at: <https://dicionario.priberam.org/almocreve> [Accessed 12 May 2022].

Giacometti, M., 1971. A Festa da Santa Cruz na Aldeia da Venda. Povo Que Canta. RTP.

Giacometti, M., 1972. A Oração das Almas em São Bento do Ameixial. Povo que Canta. RTP.

 

Music and Conflict is a book edited by ethnomusicologists John Morgan O’Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo Branco, which describes and analyses many situations where the production and propagation of music were used under conflicting scenarios through various essays written by several scholars.

O’Connell highlights primarily the importance of defining what Conflict is, given that it might have several forms and it can be either positive or negative outcomes. Hence, Conflict can be “viewed negatively, as the logical outcome of economic inequality and social disparity leading inevitably to violent rupture where the status of a dominant elite is called into question (Morgan O’Connell & El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, 2010). It is also evaluated as a nonrational behaviour, following the minimal group theory developed by Henry Tajfel; still, it is also seen as a “rational reaction to power where the state provides a locus for simulating models of group interaction”. 

Conflict can be understood through music when its musical treats are evaluated and put under the perspective of those who create it. For instance, these can be noticed in the music’s structure, systems, materials, practice, contexts, and values. These factors are symbolic, and they are also an analogy. 

Additionally, Music and Conflict questions the work of an ethnomusicologist when it is set to register any situation that portrays the influence of music in Conflict and vice-versa. “As Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco argues in the epilogue, although ethnomusicologists may operate as mediators in conflictual situations, they may also have to become politically engaged if conflict resolution is to be effective.”(Morgan O’Connell & El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, 2010).

Concerning my topic, this book appeared to have discussions capable of bearing fruit on questions related to the methodologies of an ethnomusicologist. How should one position himself in a conflicting situation? What are the limits and complications an ethnomusicologist faces? How could this be useful for analysing Michel Giacometti’s work? How do the case studies reflected in this book relate to the Portuguese Conflict? There is indeed an immediate connection between the popular music that appeared before and after the Carnation Revolution, resembling the names of Zeca Afonso, José Mario Branco, Adriano Correia de Oliveira, among others, who sang and produced protest songs either to overthrow the dictatorship and later to be a cornerstone to socialist political ideologies. However, what about traditional music? Where does it belong? What is the status of these forms of music? These are questions that this book struggle to answer.

Morgan O’Connell, J. and El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, S., 2010. Music and Conflict. 1st ed. University of Illinois Press, pp.1-12.

For More Than One Voice is a book written by Adriana Cavarero, an Italian philosopher with many writings on voice and feminism. Although her speech nature is politically and philosophically focused on the feminist voice, she has also discussed general ideas on the politics of voice, which are essential to the means of my essay.

In this book, Adriana Cavarero discusses the definition of voice and its position on contemporary philosophy, deconstructing ontological schools of thought that have deteriorated its core meaning so far. She begins by quoting the Italian writer Italo Calvino: “A voice means this: there is a living person, throat, chest, feelings, who send into the air this voice, different from all other voices”, and by this, she reflects on the uniqueness that voice has apart from speech. Speech relates to linguistics, the science that studies the human language. However, Cavarero agrees with Paul Zumthor that the prior is far more connected to orality than vocality, “the whole of the activities and values that belong to the voice as such, independently of language”.

With this book, I pretend to evaluate a Giacometti quote.

We shouldn’t criticise the way these people sing because this is the best way they know how to express themselves. I’m also interested in understanding whether such an evaluation would apply to the case study I am working on. My central inquiry is: Does the subject’s voice have a deeper meaning in Giacometti’s recordings? What perspectives can be introduced to help understand the tapes?

In fact, Giacometti’s subjects are not expressing tormenting experiences during the ongoing dictatorship. Instead, they are singing and telling stories at work and recreationally through distinct forms of Portuguese traditional music and customs. Empirically, the people who sing are indeed singing. However, ontologically, and according to Adriana Cavarero, voice “is not at all a thinking that expresses itself out loud, nor is it merely vocalised thought, nor is it an acoustic substitute for think.”(Cavarero, 2005). Additionally, Cavarero also differentiates the act of communicating and speaking, whereas the voice uniqueness is noticed before the intention of transmitting information to another. In this way, Giacometti’s intentions, apart from recording different forms of folk music and locating them in a context of oppression, can be analysed under this new philosophy of voice ontology. 

References:

Cavarero, A., 2005. For More than One Voice. 1st ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.173-182.

Acosutemology is a term coined in 1980 by Steven Feld, an American anthropologist born in 1949 that aims to understand how the production and listening of som (including music) can be an instrument for knowledge, with relations between humans and non-humans, and those to the environment. The term is a word composed of acoustic and epistemology. It tries to understand the space of sound interaction between animals and humans, which doesn’t limit itself to its physical condition but extends to non-material worlds. It doesn’t restrict itself to understanding the world passively but with the help of those who listen and reproduce sound, exchange experiences, and reflect on their practices and sound perceptions.

Acoustemology is, thus, a tool for comprehending how different beings that cohabit in the same social or geographic space and build their relations, having sound as a form o connection. 

It was with the Kaluli, who belong to the Bosavi people tribe in Papua New Guinea, where Feld entered anthropology with his musical knowledge in 1976, and the result came out in 1982 in the form of a book called Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (1982). By that time, he considered himself an ethnomusicologist. Still, he later realised the term wasn’t adequate to refer to all societies’ sound and music productions because the ethnic creates a space between western people and the non-western. Feld argues that the study of the sound output should embrace musical manifestations and other expressions in a soundscape. So, acoustemology also attenuates the tensions between anthropology and musicology: the first centred on humans, and the second, on the European concept of music. 

Feld projects acoustemology as a mode of understanding sound as part of a process way broader than the relation between beings capable of producing knowledge regarding interactions and trades. Sound comprehension involves material and physical experience because the sound would be any vibration in the air captured by the cells of our ears and transformed into electric impulses sent to the brain. Apart from that, it carries a social dimension, since what we hear and how we do it brings traces of our experiences and society.

Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing is a book written in 2011 by Dr Julian Henriques, who lectures in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University, London, United Kingdom. In the book, he uses the Kingston (Jamaica) reggae sound system scene to explore the concept of sound embodiment, or, as the title suggests, sonic bodies, through an epistemological perspective of sound, based on the categorical concepts provided throughout the years by philosophers.

Julian Henriques suggests that one can think through sound and use the feelings and sensations in dancehall scenes to describe this affirmation

The sheer physical force, volume, weight and mass of it. Sonic dominance is hard, extreme and excessive.

Henriques, Julian. ‘Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System Session’. In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 451–80. Sensory Formations Series. Oxford, UK and New York: Berg, 2003.

He compares the presence of sound to an ocean wave, where one feels emerged and in a total emancipated form of it. “The sound pervades, or even invades the body, like smell. Sonic dominance is both a near over-load of sound and a super saturation of sound. You’re lost inside it, submerged under it. This volume of sound crashes down on you like an ocean wave, you feel the pressure of the weight of the air like diving deep underwater” (Henriques, 2003)

Julian considers that there are many forms of expression, and sight is often seen as the major one, as well as written language, and symbols. However, sound possesses the same notation of understanding and lacks the need for pictorial representation or any other form of communication, such as music. These considerations were also purposed under a triad he designed, which analysis sonic bodies in the context of instruments of the sound system.

Henriques also divides sounding epistemologically into 3 categories:

1. Mechanical: as auditory propagation and specific sensory modality of audition, distinct from, yet integrated with the other senses.
2. Practical: as the basis for the techniques and traditions of a particular popular auditory culture
3. Theoreticall: as a dynamic model for both raising questions about the world

Sounding is a concept similar to Musicking (conceptualised by Christopher Small) defined by the author as something that “requires kinetic movement, with the corporeal agents of sonic bodies”, and englobes everything that entails its production and scene, from the crew to the social culture ambient.

The essay in analysis, written by Dr Constance Clasen, a cultural historian who specialises in the History of Senses, talks about the concept of anthropology of the senses by explaining what it means and what it represents in academia, and which ways are taken now.

• 

She introduces the paper by affirming the necessity of unwesternisation of the perspective of the senses, referring that we (westerners) perceive the world as one of the many possibilities of ways, and should not be seen as the only and most advanced one. She compares, how many cultures use sight to describe social relations.

in “Foundations for an anthropology of the senses”

Within Western history we find, aside from the customary grouping into
five senses, enumerations of four, six or seven senses described at different periods by different persons. Thus, for example, taste and touch are sometimes grouped together as one sense, and touch is sometimes divided into several senses

This affirmation is supported by a breakdown of three assumptions that society over the senses, and on which Constance considers to be the impediments that a scholar must fight for. They are:

• Senses are precultural: Senses aren’t “purely biological in nature (…)”. Social codes is proof of this affirmation, and Classen uses the example of sight in different cultural contexts – “To stare at someone may signify rudeness, flattery or domination depending on the circumstances and the culture. Downcast eyes, in turn, may suggest modesty fear, contemplation or inattention”.
• “Sight is the only sense of major importance”: this is what anthropology of the senses mostly argues about. “Sight came to distance itself significantly from the other senses in terms of cultural imortance only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centures, when vision beacame associated with the burgeoning field of science” and it was even more exalted with Darwin and Freud.
• The perspectives of some anthropology scholars: scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Water Ong, argue that the “sensory model of a society is determined by a its technologies of communication”.

While reading this part, I thought about how art nowadays focuses more on sight than on the other senses. On the PDF I noted: “This article destroys most of the arts lectured in this collage”. The film is one of the arts that was already addressed by Jacques Rancière, who postulates against the supremacy of image over sound, and the other senses.

It is also interesting, to understand whether this perspective could be applied in our practice as sound artists. Taking the work of Francisco Lopéz and Pauline Oliveros into consideration, these two teach us how to enhance listening and also try to differentiate the terms to listen and to hear. It makes me conclude, that sound art is a neo-western reflection of sound. It also takes me back to my research for sound installation where I was trying to connect both senses of touch and hearing, which has a fundamental scientific investigation done by the Acoustical Society of America.