NO ART

Imagine a world without sound – how much less interesting and immersive it would be? No birdsong, wind rustling through leaves, the thumping of speakers at your favourite concert, or the lively restaurant ambience as cutlery clinks and patrons murmur. Imagine no sound practitioners – specialists who invest their lives into recording, creating, mixing, performing and working with sound and all of its potential. Despite making up such a vast and persistent part of the Earthly and human experience, how often do we actually take notice and listen? How often do we take sound and all of its capabilities for granted?

My submission for this edition of Creative Matters is a critique of the hierarchies of value traditionally found within soundtrack, where image and music are assigned more value than sound editing and sound design in traditional audiovisual media. Rather than take a position of imagining a world with no art (in this case, no art in sound) and reinforce the hierarchy that relegates sound to a supportive, background role, I have instead sought to juxtapose this by exploring what would happen if we were to invert this hierarchy and treat sound with the same level of focus and attention that we do visual and musical components. The creative practice output of this is an eight-piece acousmatic1 concept album titled Sonic Dreamers. This article explores key aspects of sound design and editing (dialogue editing, soundscape design, foley, synchronisation, world-building, and audio manipulation), and the methods undertaken to repurpose them for an intentional, focused listening experience.

Sound is a vital part of the audiovisual relationship (it is half of the word, after all), yet when we engage daily with audiovisual media (films, TV series, video games), how often do we focus on the sonic properties? Academic and author Tony Gibbs, in their book The Fundamentals of Sonic Art & Sound Design (2007), put this succinctly, describing sonic arts as ‘a medium that has traditionally been regarded as inferior and subservient to other creative or expressive forms... and only has a supportive role’ (p. 8). There is a rich body of research that discusses and critiques this traditional audiovisual hierarchy and even a term for it, visuocentrism (see O’Callaghan 2007; Ihde 2007; Huvenne 2016). Rather than functioning as an independent agent, sound is traditionally confined to a supporting role in the visual component. Even within the soundtrack, there is a hierarchy of assigned value, prioritising music over other sonic elements such as sound design, synchronisation, foley and ambience. Unlike these other largely ignored soundtrack elements, music is broadly defined as ‘the art of combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion’ represented by ‘the written or printed score of a musical composition’ (Greene 2016, p. 25). There are limited discussions surrounding the sonic hierarchy. Generally, the focus is on the hierarchy of vision over sound, and on the blurring boundaries between music and sound design roles in experimental and avant-garde cinema (see Birtwistle 2016; Greene 2016; Kulezic-Wilson 2008, 2020). However, Liz Greene, in their chapter From Noise: Blurring the Boundaries of the Soundtrack (2016), theorises that in traditional cinema, the written score ‘gives music a prestige over other elements of the soundtrack... [It] highlights the composer’s creative work and deems it worthy of note at the outset of the film...in Hollywood film, it is usually one composer who is given a front credit on the film’ (p. 26). To put what Greene writes into practice, ask yourself how many famous composers you can list compared to how many famous sound designers you can think of.

For the creation of Sonic Dreamers, I have used only original field and studio recordings captured within the last two years, most of which would have been recognisable to the untrained ear in their original form. Some of the recordings, however, have undergone copious audio manipulation, thus making them unrecognisable, and echoing sentiments which sound ecologist and avant–garde composer R. Murray Schafer wrote: that ‘[a]ny sonic environment can now become any other sonic environment’ (1994, p. 91). The tracks The Dream and Membrane, for example, were initially made using the screechings of an old violin and a pipa, and rhythmic breathing through a feadóg stáin (Irish tin whistle). However, they have been passed through what are traditionally unknown acts of sonic labour. As a result, these sounds become unrecognisable, demonstrating how audio manipulation tools can transform the everyday into the unique.

Some pieces have been pushed to align closely with traditional musical compositional practice and structures, such as Scratch, where the sporadic textural scratchings from an old, broken pipa are manually rhythmicised into something catchy and engaging. This process attempts to echo the inherent human tendency to find some reason or sense in what we hear by ascribing typical musical aspects, such as rhythm and pitch, to something that, without intervention, may have been discarded as useless noise.

Generally speaking, nonhuman sounds, such as birdsong, traffic, wind and machinery, etc., are not the focus of human attention (Born 2018, p. 188) and fade into the brain’s perceptive background. These sounds are what sound practitioners refer to as ambient sounds, which are ‘background sounds that are used to create a sense of atmosphere’ (Serafin & Serafin 2004, p. 1) and, according to the sound theorist Michel Chion, envelop a scene or inhabit space, ‘without raising the question of the identification or visual embodiment of its source’ (1994, p. 75). Two of the pieces, Garden and Rebirth, bring focus to soundscape design in opposing ways. Garden begins with a realistic soundscape: birds singing and the wind washing over us, allowing us to believe we could be in a forest or clearing. It is only as the piece continues that the bird calls begin to distort from that prior recognition, singing backwards, and the winds begin to change, that we really take notice that we are entering a new world of listening. Rebirth, in opposition to this, begins as unrecognisable: mumbling, unknown blaring (made using a low-pass EQ filter and cutting out the high frequencies) which slides into the grinding, buzzing layers of sounds invading our ears, and bringing us metaphorically (and perhaps, literally) back into reality – a train ride featuring noisy passengers.

English composer Trevor Wishart writes that ‘[c]ertain sounds retain their intrinsic recognisability under the most extreme forms of distortion. The most important sound of this type is the human voice’ (p. 150). In Lazy Dog, listeners can hear my speech ‘jumps over the lazy dog... the quick brown fox...’. However, this then dissolves into unrecognisable, rupturing blurred versions of that sentence: to do so, I used a similar re–recording technique to that of Alvin Lucier in his I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) wherein the recorder takes a sample from the space, plays it back out to the room through a speaker, and then re–records the new recording, which has been altered through a layer of the room’s resonant frequencies, making the later recordings virtually unrecognisable, as can be heard in the piece.

The concept album Sonic Dreamers experiments with the hierarchy of vision, music, and sound by turning aspects of traditional sound practice into a prioritised listening experience (a position that music usually maintains) and ordering us, the audience, to pay attention. Subverting the notion of ‘no art in sound’, the work takes sound elements and re– contextualises them in a musical context, thus exposing and critiquing the hierarchy of values ascribed to sound, which positions it in a background role compared to music and visual components. I maintain sound’s importance and value by destabilising our preconceived notions of where sounds belongs in this vision, music, and sound hierarchy, placing it within the context of a listening experience normally designated for music as the premiere sonic art.

Endnotes

1. The term acousmatic, first pioneered by experimental composer Pierre Schaeffer, describes “sound one hears without seeing their originating cause” (Chion 1994, p. 71).

Reference List

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Gibbs, T 2007, The fundamentals of sonic art & sound design. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Greene, L. 2016, From Noise: Blurring the Boundaries of the Soundtrack. In The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks. Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Huvenne, M 2016, Intertwining Music and Sound in Film. In The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks. Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Ihde, D 2007, Listening and voice: phenomenologies of sound (2nd ed.). State University of New York Press.

Kulezic-Wilson, D 2008, Sound Design is the New Score. Music, Sound and the Moving Image, 2(2), 127–131. https://doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2.2.5

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