This section of the project doesn’t include any listening exercises. Instead, it consists of a series of theoretical insights questioning the ways we think about sound.
“For three billion years, life was nearly silent, its sounds confined to the tremors of cell walls and the eddies around simple animals. But during those long, quiet years, evolution built a structure that would later transform the sounds of Earth. This innovation—a tiny wiggly hair on the cell membrane—helped cells to swim, steer, and gather food. This hair, known as a cilium, protrudes into the fluid around the cell. Many cells deploy multiple cilia, gaining extra swimming power from clusters or pelts of the beating hairs. How cilia evolved is not fully understood, but they may have started as extensions of the protein scaffolding within the cell. Any motion in the water is transmitted into the weave of living proteins in the core of the cilium and then back into the cell. This transmission became the foundation for life’s awareness of sound waves. By changing electrical charges in the cells’ membranes and molecules, cilia translated motions exterior to the cell into the chemical language of the cells’ interiors. Today all animals use cilia to sense sonic vibrations around them, using either specialized hearing organs or cilia scattered on the skin and in the body”.
– David George Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken.
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Insects communication
“Vibrational communication is widespread in insect social and ecological interactions. Of the insect species that communicate using sound, water surface ripples, or substrate vibrations, we estimate that 92% use substrate vibrations alone or with other forms of mechanical signaling. Vibrational signals differ dramatically from airborne insect sounds, often having low frequencies, pure tones, and combinations of contrasting acoustic elements. Plants are the most widely used substrate for transmitting vibrational signals.”
Reginald B. Cocroft, Rafael L. Rodríguez
Humans and mammals in general communicate mainly through airborne sound: we make air molecules vibrate with our voices and our ears detect these tiny changes in atmospheric pressure. Most insects, on the other hand, communicate by mechanically stressing the substrates on which they live (a leaf, a stem of grass or the ground) and are able to sense these vibrations through sensory organs in the joints of their legs.
However, recording vibration communication between arthropods is very challenging because the vibrations produced are tiny (in the nanometre range). In addition, contact microphones (devices placed in direct contact with a surface) have a mass greater than the fragile structures to which they are attached.
Attempts have been made, with little success, by leaning turntable pins against plants…More recently, the automotive and aeronautical industries have developed a sophisticated technique for detecting vibrations without physical contact: a low- intensity laser is fired at an object and a sensor receives its reflection, measuring in real time the discrepancy between the initial and returning light beams. Some biologists have begun to use these devices in their research.
– Listen to a recording we made by pointing two laser “vibrometers” at a single tiny blade of grass in the middle of a large meadow we found just outside the city of Milan. It captures a surprising amount of sonic activity that we could not have imagined was there without using this very sophisticated device.
Recorded in August 2024, in collaboration with Juan Lopez from the Department of Organism and Ecosystem Research at the National Institute of Biology of Slovenia.
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Audio time lapse
For his piece Air Pressure Fluctuations, the Dutch artist Felix Hess placed two microphones on a friend’s property and recorded for five days and five nights straight. He then played back the recording at 360 times the original speed. As a result, when you listen to the final 20-minute piece, you can hear the sound of the tides pushing and pulling the air on our planet.
“Infrasound, although we cannot hear it, it’s still sound, only the frequencies are far too low [for us to hear], and I was very curious what happens if you would hear it by speeding it up: if you played it at much higher speed than when you record it, every pitch gets higher and maybe you could hear it. So, I made myself a digital stereo infrasound recorder by a dedicated laptop, a commercially available for scientific purposes data acquisition card, made software, built two very sensitive infrasound microphones or sensors and a friend who had a very large piece of land, I used that to make the recordings. It needed to be very large because I had chosen to speed the sound up by a factor of 360 so that it becomes audible. It means that one second on the CD that I made was 360 seconds or 6 minutes, and 24 hours is reduced to 4 minutes. In order to get good stereo, you know how we use stereo, it can be that the left ear is a little bit stronger than the right ear but it’s also the time difference so if the sound comes from the left it first reaches this ear and then that ear and these small time differences make us hear direction and in order to get that right when you speed up everything so much you must start out with a very long distance between the two sensors, 360 times as far as our ears are apart, so something like 65 meters, that’s why I needed a friend with a big piece of land and what you hear when it’s sped up is all kinds of beeping sounds which are deep rumblings from factories or heavy traffic, small clicking sounds like autumn leaves which come from doors opening and closing, maybe the neighbour might have a washing machine, you would notice that, and supersonic airplanes and sometimes the ocean when it dances. A specialist of the World Dutch Meteorological Institute informed me about that, that when there is a depression over the ocean let’s say near Iceland or so it can make the sea dance like that and that emits infrasound which travels for thousands of kilometers.”
Transcript from AV Festival 10 / Felix Hess: From Science
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Pine needles
For many years, sound artist Max Neuhaus has been fascinated by the sound of pine forests, in particular by the fact that their unique sound source - two pine needles rubbing together - is inaudible. It only becomes audible when multiplied by millions of pine needles rubbing together.
We find this idea of a multitude of tiny sound emitters, each slightly different from the other, producing an extraordinarily rich, smooth and subtle sound texture a rather inspiring hint at how we might listen to organic wholes like a forest or the rain.
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Rain
This is a poem titled Rain by Francis Ponge (1899-1988), who famously devoted his career to writing poetry about the almost trivial facts and things of everyday life. We
often read it during our workshops as an example of how richly textured, almost inexhaustible source of attentional cues, an ordinary event like rain can be if we really pay attention to it.
“Rain, in the courtyard where I watch it fall, comes down at very different speeds. At the center it is a sheer uneven curtain (or net), an implacable but relatively slow descent of fairly light drops, an endless precipitation without vigor, a concentrated fraction of the total meteor. Not far from the walls to the right and left, heavier individuated drops fall more noisily. Here they seem the size of wheat kernels, there large as peas, elsewhere big as marbles. Along the window sills and mouldings the rain streaks horizontally, while on the underside of these obstacles it hangs suspended like lozenges. It ripples along, thinly coating the entire surface of a little zinc roof beneath my glance, moiréed with the various currents caused by the imperceptible rises and falls of the covering. From the nearby gutter, where it flows with the effort of a shallow brook poorly sloped, it plummets sharply to the ground in a perfectly vertical, thickly corded trickle where it shatters and rebounds like glistening icicles.
Each of its forms has a particular speed, accompanied by a particular sound. All of it runs with the intensity of a complex mechanism, as precise as it is unpredictable, like a clockwork whose mainspring is the weight of a given mass of precipitating vapour.
The pealing of the vertical jets on the ground, the gurgling of the gutters, the tiny gong strokes, multiply and resound together in a concert neither monotonous nor unsubtle.
When the mainspring has unwound, some wheels go on turning for a while, more and more slowly, until the whole machinery stops. Should the sun then reappear, everything is soon effaced; the glimmering mechanism evaporates: it has rained”.
From The Voice of Things by Francis Ponge.
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Another text we often propose to participants in our workshops is from Thoreau’s Walden, in which the author affirms the productive and creative capacity of the echo, which is not merely the repetition of a sound.
“Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph”.
From WALDEN or life in the woods [1854], by H.D.Thoreau.
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The dance of attention
“There was very little difference in meaning,” says autistic Daina Krumins, “between the children next to the lake that I was playing with and the turtle sitting on the log. It seems,” she continues, “that when most people think of something being alive they really mean, human” (quoted in Miller 2003, 23–89).
[…] “I hear the rocks and the trees” (Mukhopadhyay in Miller 2003, 54).
For autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, to hear the rocks and the trees on an equal footing with the voices of children is a sign of what he calls “mindblindness.” Mindblindness is generally defined as an inability to develop an awareness of what is in the mind of another human. To have mindblindness, Baron-Cohen suggests, is to lack empathy. It is to be generally unrelational. He says that this is what defines autistics (1995).
Yet from the autistic, we hear neither a rejection of the human, nor a turning away from relation. What we hear is an engagement with the more-than human:
“I attend to everything the same way with no discrimination, so that the caw of the crow in the tree is as clear and important as the voice of the person I’m walking with” (Krumins in Miller 2003, 86). And an engagement with a more textured relating: “My world is organized around textures. […] All emotions, perceptions, my whole world […] [has] been influenced by textures” (Krumins in Miller 2003, 87).
To experience the texture of the world “without discrimination” is not indifference. Texture is patterned, full of contrast and movement, gradients and transitions. It is complex and differentiated. To attend to everything “the same way” is not an inattention to life. It is to pay equal attention to the full range of life’s texturing complexity, with an entranced and unhierarchized commitment to the way in which the organic and the inorganic, color, sound, smell, and rhythm, perception and emotion, intensely interweave into the “aroundness” of a textured world, alive with difference. It is to experience the fullness of a dance of attention. For all the challenges of autism, this is not without joy.
For all the challenges of autism, this is not without joy. “Everything [is] somewhat alive to me” (Krumins in Miller 2003, 86).
“Happiness to me was the immediateness of the environment” (Mukhopadhyay in Iversen 2006, 104).
A dance of attention is the holding pattern of an immersive, almost unidentifiable set of forces that modulate the event in the immediateness of its coming to expression. Attention not to, but with and toward, in and around. Undecomposably.
From Thought in the act, passages in the ecology of experience by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi.
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The following is an excerpt from a book which is useful for understanding the relationships between sound, space and the body: Spaces Speak, are you listening, by Berry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter. The passage we quote discusses the link between the way we perceive sound and the evolutionary processes that have sculpted it over the millennia. For example, the authors state that our ability to distinguish between a sound and its sound reflection by the environment is informed by the average reverberation time of forests. In addition, the substantial difference between sound in enclosed spaces, which is more static and still, and in open spaces, which is more dynamic and rich in tonal nuances, is described.
“Assuming that our auditory cortex evolved the means to model the acoustics of forests, jungles, and savannas, we are now using old evolutionary solutions to hear new spaces. There is no better example of this than how we aurally experience reverberation. What does it mean to hear a concert hall with ears designed for a forest? Characterized by a high density of low-level sonic reflections from surfaces typically found in the environment, tree trunks, branches, and leaves, forest reverberation is generally limited in duration to about 200 milliseconds, compared with many seconds for large enclosed spaces. When we earlier analyzed the perception of concert hall reverberation, we observed that early sonic reflections fuse with the direct sound, whereas later ones form sustained, enveloping reverberation. The boundary between these two aspects of reverberation is the same order of magnitude as the duration of forest reverberation, about 100 milliseconds. We hear the early reverberation of an enclosed space with brain substrates that evolved for forest reverberation. The adaptation of fusing early sonic reflections into a perceived single source would have been useful to our early ancestors. Moreover, what we now call ‘‘apparent source width,’’ which is a property of early reverberation, appears to be nothing more than an auditory awareness of the degradation of sound by forest acoustics.
Except for the occasional cavern, there was never any historical counterpart of an enclosed space that was capable of spreading sound energy over a long duration, what we call ‘‘sustained reverberation.’’ Moreover, early humans did not make caverns their natural habitat. Similarly, except for an occasional cliff or steep embankment, there was no mechanism for creating a sonic reflection with sufficient delay that could be heard as a discrete echo, a discrete event. Forests, jungles, and savannas do not produce echoes. From a survival perspective, it would have been critical for an early human to distinguish between a single event with multiple sonic reflections and multiple sonic events from different sources. It is therefore not surprising that sound arriving well beyond the fusing interval is heard as distinct from the direct sound, either as a coherent echo or as diffuse reverberation. Both are perceived as if originating from different sources, even though we, as modern humans, know that the spatial acoustics create the second event from the first. The linking of reverberation with the direct sound is cognitive rather than perceptual.
Another difference between indoor and outdoor acoustics is the degree to which sound transmission is static, without time-varying changes to the auditory channel. Even in large enclosed spaces, such as a cathedral, air is relatively stable and homogeneous, at least compared with natural environments. The auditory cortex expects to hear spectral and temporal variations produced by turbulent air, shifting thermal layers, and the surfaces of moving objects. Animal vocalizations also contain similar variations. Even without acoustics, sound sources were never spectrally pure, perfectly periodic, or reliably repeatable. The need for such variation, in order to sound natural and pleasant, is exemplified by the musical tradition of vibrato and tremolo, explicit changes to pitch and amplitude. But the same is true of spatial acoustics. Our auditory cortex is designed with the expectation of variability when perceiving space. Reverberators using a static algorithm sound more mechanical, whereas those which include the appropriate random modulations sound more natural.
In addition to segmenting sound into discrete sonic events, the ability to aurally localize the source of a single sound exists in almost every mammal. It is easy to understand why localization is useful. Where are the prey or predators, and which path leads to food or safety? Many parts of the auditory cortex and the resulting auditory perceptions they produce are entirely consistent with the need to aurally localize. The affective component of aural localization, which contributes knowledge about the sender’s location, is separate from and independent of the affective component of the direct sound, which contributes knowledge about the sender’s message and emotional state. If aural localization of important sounds is that critical to survival, we can assume that inability to aurally localize would make an animal attentive, uncomfortable, and perhaps anxious. Such would then be the case for diffused reverberation, where sonic reflections lacking a strong direct component arrive from all directions.
To localize a sound source, the auditory cortex suppresses the irrelevant information in early sonic reflections while extracting the difference in time and amplitude for the direct sound, which arrives before the reflections. Perceptual and neurological scientists, who have been studying this ability for years, call it the ‘‘precedence effect,’’ whereas audio engineers, who use this in the design of public address amplification systems, know it as the ‘‘Haas effect.’’ In its simplest form, localization of the direct sound remains stable even when followed by a single discrete sonic reflection in the time window from 2 to 20 milliseconds after the direct sound. Because this effect is robust, stable, and consistent across the population, it invites an evolutionary explanation. Fusing the numerous early sonic reflections in a 100-millisecond time window is consistent with forest reverberation. What is the analogy for a single strong sonic reflection in a 20-millisecond time window? The only flat hard surface that could consistently produce a large specular sonic reflection is the ground, and the delay between the direct sound and a sonic reflection from the ground would be on the order of 5 milliseconds for a primate standing at a modest distance; for primates living in trees, the delay would be significantly longer. A single sonic reflection from the ground is a universal property of all spaces that existed for ancient and modern animals.
We in modern society still experience acoustic spaces in a way consistent with our inherited legacy from our early ancestors in their prehistoric spaces. Scientists can observe aspects of this aural inheritance in their laboratories; composers incorporate aspects in their musical creations; aural architects embed aspects in their spatial creations; and listeners hear aspects when attending a concert or conversing in their living rooms.”
From Spaces speak, are you listening, by Berry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter
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Time and Weather
“By chance or wisdom, the French language uses a single word, temps, for the time that passes and for the weather outside, a product of climate and of what our ancestors called meteors.
Today our expertise and our worries turn toward the weather, because our industrious know-how is acting, perhaps catastrophically, on global nature, which those same ancestors thought didn’t depend on us. From now on, not only does it doubtless depend on us, but, in return, our lives depend on this mobile atmospheric system, which is inconstant but fairly stable, deterministic and stochastic, moving quasi-periodically with rhythms and response times that vary colossally. […] In days gone by, two men lived out in the often intemperate weather: the peasant and the sailor. How they spent their time, hour by hour, depended on the state of the sky and on the sea sons. We’ve lost all memory of what we owe these two types of men, from the most rudimentary technologies to the highest subtleties. A certain ancient Greek text divides the earth into two zones: one where a given tool was regarded as a grain shovel and another where passersby recognized the same tool as an oar. In the West, these two populations are gradually disappearing from the face of the earth; agricultural surpluses and high-tonnage ves- sels are turning the sea and the land into deserts. The greatest event of the twentieth century incontestably remains the disappearance of agricultural activity at the helm of human life in general and of individual cultures. Now living only indoors, immersed only in passing time and not out in the weather, our contemporaries, packed into cities, use neither shovel nor oar; worse yet, they’ve never even seen them. Indifferent to the climate, except during their vacations when they rediscover the world in a clumsy, arcadian way, they naively pollute what they don’t know, which rarely hurts them and never concerns them.”
From The Natural Contract, by Michel Serres.