Sound Studies and Aural Cultures – Ⓡⓐⓤⓛ 'ⓢ Ⓢⓞⓤⓝⓓ Ⓙⓞⓤⓡⓝⓐⓛ

Audio Paper: #2: An Analytical Overview of Michel Giacometti’s Life and Work.

This document represents a fraction of all my research. The terms in bold are the topics that I’ve done further and extensive research on.

Borns in Corsica, 1929. He studied in Paris and became an ethnologist (as a student, Giacometti was quite active with his political speech during this time). Works at Musée de l’Homme (as an ethnologist, his curriculum was already fascinating at 26. Fell in love with the Portuguese, Isabel Ribeiro.

1958: discovers Kurt Schindler’s and Rodney Gallop’s testimonials on Portuguese ethnic music and culture and becomes obsessed.

Kurt Schindler’s Recording from 1932 Se tu quiés que t’anrrame la puorta in Trás-os-Montes

1959: He was diagnosed with tuberculosis and moved permanently to Portugal by his doctor’s recommendation. I’ve found some other details about his health state after 1974 when he referred to how difficult it was for him to undertake his practice while being almost incapable. In another interview in 1984, he said that his health state allowed him to register every ethnic phenomenon all over Portugal. However, from the 80s till his death, Giacometti was almost forgotten, and most of his expeditions turned into solitary battles).

February: First sound collection in Bragança.

1960: w/ Fernando Lopes Graça (he would rarely follow him, but he was “the music connoisseur who advised Giacometti, and who made the musicological study of the themes”, according to musicologist Mário Vieira de Carvalho) founds the first-ever Portuguese Sound Archive. Together they edited two dozen phonographic collections: Anthology of Portuguese Regional Music.

The anthology became famous under the tag of *Serapilheira Discs*, referring to the type of material that the cover was made of

1961: Giacometti collaborated with the legendary Portuguese sound technician José Fortes.

1962: Realises ethnographic series with Radiotelevisão Portuguesa‘s (RTP)* production, entitled O Alar da Rede (there’s no direct translation of this phrase, but it is an Algarvian expression that stands for net pulling.

*it is crucial to understand RTP’s positionality during this period

1963: Realises Rio de Onor: uma reunião do conselho. A film about town meetings in a remote village of Trás-os-montes

1963: Beginning of production of radio programs** for the Emissora Nacional (Portuguese’s statal radio broadcast), Radio France, BRT, WDR, Sveriges Riskradio on traditional Portuguese music and its functions. It lasted until 1983.

**There’s no information about these programs. They might have been stored in the Portuguese Sound Archive at Torre do Tombo (The National Archive), which I already contacted. It would be interesting if I could work there on my DSP year.

**However, after researching a little bit, I found out that an old Emissora Nacional’s archive in Pegões, Setúbal, was abandoned in 2011. In 2018, reporters found rare Giacometti vinyl recordings broken on the sight.

1970: The beginning of producing a documentary series that would later become a consecration: People who sing (original: Povo Que Canta), directed by Alfredo Tropa.

Cantinela da Pedra, meaning the Song of the Rock, a work song performed to “enchant blocks of stone and make it lighter”.

Fragmentos de um Inquérito em Salir. A man interrupts the episode to tell his stories

Campaniça Guitar. An incredible encounter with a campaniça guitar player. The camera closes up to him, and Giacometti stands next to him, listening.

1972: Integrates the team of researchers at the Faculty of Arts of Lisbon – Geography Institute and develops the Line of Action for the Collection and Study of Popular Literature, culminating in 1982.

1975: Structures the Work and Culture Plan for Students of the Student Service (Recovering Portuguese culture, an objective for students of the Civic Service). He was part of the FNAT (a fascist institution National Foundation for Joy at Work, in Portuguese, Fundação Nacional para a Alegria no Trabalho) Reorganization Commission, later replaced by INATEL (National Institute of Telecommunications), and proposed the creation of the Worker-Farmer Documentation Center (CDOC, Centro de Documentação Operário-Camponesa)

Giacometti taught his recording techniques on a massive instructional workshop taken in 1975 before the beginning of the expedition in August of the same year. More than 200 young students participated in this lecture and later went all over the country to record and interview people.

1981: Edits with Lopes-Graça, and with the support of Círculo de Leitores, the Cancioneiro Popular Português (Portuguese popular songbook). He sells his collection of musical instruments and ethnographic objects to the Municipality of Cascais, and the latter later founds the Portuguese Music Museum at Casa das Verdades de Faria, in Monte Estoril.

1984: He sells the Portuguese Sound Archives to the Secretary of State for Culture, everything being found today in the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon.

1987: Inauguration of the Museu do Trabalho (Labour Museum), in Setúbal, where Giacometti collaborates in executing the exhibition O Trabalho Faz o Homem (Humans are made of labour).

1990: The last report on his work is conducted in August, in a campaign to Peroguarda (Ferreira do Alentejo), by journalist Adelino Gomes. On November 24th, he died in Faro. He is buried, at his request, in Peroguarda.

2010: On the 20th anniversary of his death, a commemorative edition was made with all his filmography: Michel Giacometti – Complete Filmography.

Audio Paper: #1: an honest declaration

For this assignment, I will reanalyse the work of the Corsican ethnomusicologist, Michel Giacometti, during 1959 and 1974 in totalitarian Portugal and prove how his job didn’t just go through making an archive of all Portuguese ethnic music and folk traditions. Michel’s intentions were far ahead of that, which were maintained under the tag of abstract practices and subliminal messages.

When I first decided which theme I would research for this audio paper, I was pretty optimistic about the whole procedure. I started planning the month of October and November to make that happen. I

innocently thought that my research was going to be straightforward to make. However, the theme that I picked didn’t exist. The only information I would find was inaccessible, hidden in old academic archives, and sometimes even encrypted. The only credible information I had was belief. I believed that Michel Giacometti’s work wasn’t just a mere collection of ethnic music.

My first so far can be seen as a puzzle. If I couldn’t search things instantly, it would have to be by searching piece by piece and analysing every document I found as evidence. There was no information in English, which is concerning. Then I realise that neither in french there’s valuable documentation. Portuguese was the only language with available sources, and gladly I am Portuguese. I first started with the obvious. I read every single paper about his life and stay in Portugal. Then I began digging newspapers archives, and miraculously there were interviews about him from the 80s and 90s with actual quotes and beneficial information. Then I researched some Portuguese counties, which later did homages to Michel to see if I could get different sections, which happened four times as far as I’m concerned: twice in Setúbal, once in Cascais, and another one in Ferreira do Alentejo. The more I dived into the subject, the more I would find valuable information for my research. I began to understand how should I search this topic as a code that only specific keywords would trigger the info I needed. It wasn’t effortless to find material even under Portuguese-based searching.

I didn’t have access to all his sound archives. Publico and RTP, the national broadcast radio and television, have released all of his productions for 120 euros, with a compilation of his notes. My father owns these CD’s, but there was no way to reach him. Youtube had most of the relevant recordings I needed for the assignment, but not for the sake of the research itself. To understand his positionality in the whole story, I would have to watch and listen to his recordings and read all of his notes. I tried to listen to everything available for me, but it would take more than 24 hours to listen, and another 24 or probably more only for note-taking. I had to abandon this utopic idea and proceed with scriptwriting and audio production.

Script-writing was complicated. I had to narrow down my research into at least 1100 words (11 minutes). When I started writing, it was tempting to go back and research a couple more details about Giacometti’s notes, but time was consuming, and I had to make progress. I’ve looked at all my research and hand-picked which things should I highlight. When the script was done, it was too late to amend it. When I recorded my voice, it reached precisely 11 minutes. While editing, I managed to cut it down to 9, but that would mean I would only have 3 minutes of creative sound exploration and showcasing. Some things were inevitable not to extend, but others had to be censored from the audio paper. However, my final export was 12:59 seconds.

I had three options:

Cut down a big chunk of information and spend a lot of time editing and making it sound appropriate for delivery.
Cut precisely 11 minutes and explain later that there was more coming up.
Don’t do anything and assume responsibilities.

I picked the last option because I realised I didn’t even have enough time to complete my blog posts when I checked the clock. I consider that this type of occurring are crucial for educative purposes. It was my responsibility to submit work as it should.

When I submitted my project, it didn’t mean my research’s end. I’m too attached to the subject, and I can’t simply avoid all the questions I have that need an answer. I could later realise I was wrong about Giacometti’s intentions, but I already have too much evidence about it, and I’m so close to proving my point. The realistic timing for my audio paper would be at least 1 hour, and I promise that I will be truthful to the finalisation of this research.

#2 Audio Papers: “a so-called archive” short-film by Onyeka Igwe (review)

I arrived at the screening in a rush, not knowing where LUX was located. I had high expectations of this exhibition, however, I was guided to a small room with a screen perfect for a 4:3 screen. The film wasn’t 4:3, but 16:9, and sadly the sound system wasn’t ideal either. I assure the reader that I’m not hating on the display for no apparent reason: I’m expressing my pitty towards what could be an amazing exhibition. The film was well filmed and structured, with most of the shots being still and observant, but critical and poetic.

The doc. guides us through two archives, one in Lagos (Nigeria) and the other in Bristol (UK), where the director considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their material. Besides this powerful motif, the director lacked a subject. If these archives are considered as the element of exposition, there is, even so, a void with no meaning to cover it. Therefore, Onyeka used sound to solve the problem by creating a surreal narrative that answers the proposed problem: “the impact of colonial images on ex-colonies”. She used fake documentary to help this purpose, mixed with other styles of storytelling such as film-noir and horror, which I believe didn’t help to release the problem, but instead to mystify and ridicule it. I could feel the urge and the clamour for meaning in every moment. I could feel how ambiguous it must have been the writing of this short. It seems that the subject itself died on purpose days before the shooting. Somehow, it feels that this reality belongs on everyone’s minds but not on this short. It seems like the sound is the issue. There is indeed a forced attempt to make it prevail over the image. I couldn’t feel harmony nor any interaction between both departments.

I must recall a brilliant short film about the “ex-tutelados” (the name given to foreign minors living with no parents under the spainsh government’s protection system in Spain) called “No Conozco La Historia del Fuego” (2021) directed by Sara Dominguéz L´opez, Luís Morla and Alberto Ruíz (translation: I don’t know the Story of Fire). In their film, the reality of these kids was exposed in 3 well composed long shots, will little interaction between the characters, momentaneous dialogue, and a beautiful and well-curated sound that cured the life of those infants and gave answers to most of the short’s questions.

#1 Audio Papers: “Like Sitting Inside a Phone” Podcast Analysis

“Like sitting inside a phone” is an audio paper directed by Jacob Kreutzfeldt and Sandra Lori Pedersen about the “paradoxical position” that radio studio has: a place made for the people, but yet is acoustically silent and solitaire.

The podcast goes around the idea of “non-place” developed by Marc Augé as a feature of typical supermodernity: also known as hypermodernity, is a type of mode of society that reflects an inversion of modernity in which the function of an object has its reference point in the form of an object rather than function being the reference point for form (the final meaning of an object is reversed from the standpoint of functionalism (the idea of designing things only for the purpose it is intended) by favouring social constructivism (the idea that postulates the human development through the engagement with others).

The podcast explores the testimonials of various radio users, from the perspective of those who do it professionally, which is contrary to those who listen to it on a daily basis.

If the term radio is demoted for its functional purpose, we come across a place where ironically promotes the opposite of what it creates: radio studios are closed spaces, with no sunlight access, silent, acoustically monotonous, and technically overwhelming. Whilst when listened, the radio listener gets the warm frequencies of a human voice coming through condenser microphones, sometimes jingles and a sense of space and amusement is created additionally.