Listen, Vibe, and Dance

Introduction

In the movie Demolition, there is a scene that Davis “dances” on the street while listening to the music through his Walkman. He seems to be apart from his surrounding environment like what Hosokawa writes about the Walkman listener in his article, “this listener seems to cut the auditory contact with the outer world where he lives: seeking the perfection of his ‘individual’ zone of listening.” (Hosokawa 106) This event does not only happen on Davis but also on other people who desire to withdraw themselves or escape from their current environments such as a quiet study room or a noisome tram so that they can “enclose” themselves in their “individual” zones. This paper will quote three important ideas from three articles, The Soundscape by R. Murray Schafer, The Three Listening Modes by Michel Chion, and The Walkman Effect by Shuhei Hosokawa, and listen to two soundscapes, Her Long Black Hair by Janet Cardiff and Electrical Walks by Christina Kubisch.

By listening to soundscapes and proving these ideas, there will be a discussion about what role human beings play in the general sonic world and how the relationship between the soundscape of the world and human beings is like. Before going deep into the discussion of listening, we shall first acknowledge the word “soundscape” and the content of our subject—Sound Studies. Schafer defines the soundscape as “any acoustic field of study” like a musical composition or a radio program, encouraging hearing instead of seeing. He has also pinned this subject on “the middle ground between science, society, and the arts.” (Schafer 96)

Science proves what the sound is and how people listen to it physically and psychologically;
society shows how people interact with the sound behaviorally;
arts, by using the soundscapes created by music, invite people to “dance.” Let us follow this description and discuss the way we listen.

Listening

In Chion’s article, three listening modes are introduced: causal listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening. These listening modes cover most of the listening in people’s daily life. Briefly, causal listening happens when people are trying to find the cause of the sound; semantic listening happens when people attempt to figure out the semantic meaning of the sound like a speech or a conversation; reduced listening happens when people “reduce” their goal of listening to the sound itself, decomposing and analyzing its sonic traits. It will be more interesting if we can test our listening modes by listening to different soundscapes.

Soundtrack - Subway in Taiwan, China

For example, there is one piece of soundscapes in the Electrical Walks named “Subway in Taiwan, China,” recording some electric sounds that are produced by the subway itself. When people first listen to the soundscapes like this, especially for those who stay inside such environments, causal listening, as “the most common but also the most easily influenced and deceptive mode of listening,” (Chion 48) occurs when they try to figure out where and how such sound is produced. Although we cannot understand what the subway is “saying,” we are still able to reduce, analyze, and define its sound as a low-pitched sound with high-frequency with a possible cause—current.

Soundtrack - Her Long Black Hair

The soundscapes in Her Long Black Hair further prove the existence and capacity of coexistence of three different listening modes when the background noise in the Track 1 consists of chirping of birds, horns of cars, talking of pedestrians, etc. When we realize that the sound is from these birds, we finished our process of causal listening. The process of understanding what Cardiff is saying and the semantics of these words is exactly what semantic listening does, suggesting that two listening modes can coexist perfectly in such a walking soundscape, or any other similar environment. However, rather than being finished, our modes of listening always happen too frequent and subconscious to realize their existence. It is also difficult to recall when people learn to recognize these sounds with the use of all types of sonic traits, including pitch, interval, length of tones, etc.

Back to the movie, Davis immerses himself in a soundscape created by the Walkman, “dancing” around while directly feeling the power of sounds and cutting himself from his “demolished” world. Putting the differences between modes of listening aside and combining them together, people can still “dance” to the soundscape and environment.

Dance on the Stage

Schafer asks one interesting question in his article, “is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have no control, or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?” (Schafer 96) The debate about whether people “compose” the soundscape of this world or it surrounds and influences people and the human society will be the main focus of this section and the rest of this paper.

In Schafer’s article, he suggests that one of the uses of the soundscape is to represent the condition, development, and history in the society with such soundscape since sounds have their own sources. Besides the soundscape of Taiwanese subway we heard before which shows the existence of electric power and technology inside its environment, there are other soundscapes that “dance” to their environments.

One of Kubisch’s soundscapes, “Security system in Oxford, England,” with bass-like beats, provides an imagination of a space placed with all kinds of machines and wires. Another soundscape named “Light systems in Paris, France” with high-frequency wave-like sounds has a picture of the flow of current along the wires. These sounds “dance” to their environment as the role of composers instead of noise producers. Since they represent the development of technology that produces these sounds, there should be a conversation with Schafer’s claims that people in the sound studies could not stand at a history perspective due to the loss of soundscapes that existed seconds, hours, or years ago.

When Schafer wrote down this idea, there were not enough technologies of recording. Nowadays, there are so many types of recording tools like phones and microphones that people can record whatever they want anytime and anywhere. However, we have to admit that there is no way to capture these past soundscapes that existed in some environments. Disregarding the technological part and letting our ears hear chirps by birds and melodies by wooden instruments in the Track 5 of “Her Long Black Hair,” we can tell that this place is different from the places in Oxford and Paris since it stays closer to the nature and these sounds are not produced by the technology.

Birds dance, so do we.

A Moving Stage

The invention of the Walkman created a sound environment that allowed people to modify their abilities of listening. Rather than the soundscape created by the street musicians that are mentioned in Hosokawa’s article, the Walkman introduces a private room where people can “live” in and play songs for others as “the ultimate object for private listening.” (Hosokawa 106) On this side of the Walkman, people act as listeners, listening to the music created by the performers on the other side of, or to say, “inside” the Walkman. This relationship is described as “actor or spectator” by Hosokawa, or “composer or performer” by Schafer. Whatever the role people act, we have to believe that with an emotional song, people may think about their first love; with an uplifting song, people may push themselves with a better spirit; with a quiet song, people may calm down to probably think about their papers. This activity is how people could “dance” to the soundscape from their minds or bodies.

Conclusion

With the practices of listening above, we should somehow be able to respond to the previous questions:

Is the soundscape of the world controllable? In a broad view, considering the Earth as the stage for soundscapes, I would believe that it could not be controlled by anyone in the world because there are so many sounds from the nature and the Earth itself as wind blows. And our human beings are only a part of this world. A more precise definition for the role of human beings in this sonic world should be presented here.
Are we the composer? I would like to agree with it since people are still able to compose for their own sonic world such as singing a melody to ourselves when feeling happy or enclosing ourselves when we need to focus. We can not only produce sounds for our individual soundscape, but also structure it by listening to a Walkman or a loudspeaker. Though we might not be able to recapture what soundscapes were like before, we would record what we have right now and save it for the future.

Besides these techniques, we are also free to share the soundscapes with or choose a soundscape from others through a song, a soundscape, a video, etc. These forms of soundscapes are also technical realizations of breaking down barriers between different “zones” and structuring our soundscapes. Though the conclusion might come too far from the study of the nature of the sound and soundscape, people who act originally as a listener but now both a composer and performer “dance” more freely.

References

• Chion, Michel. 1994. The Three Listening Modes. In Audio-Vision. Translated by C. Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Pp. 25–34
• Hosokawa, Shuhei. 1984. The Walkman Effect. Popular Music 4: 165–80
• Janet Cardiff, “Janet Cardiff - Her Long Black Hair - Central Park Sound Walk.” SoundCloud, Link.
• Kubisch, Christina. “Electrical Walks: Christina Kubisch.” CABINET, Link.
• Schafer, R. Murray. 1994. The Soundscape. In The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books. Pp. 3–12
• Hero Image, Source: Demolition (2015 film)
• The Walkman Image, Source: Unsplash, by Florian Schmetz.