Acoustic Territories Research Articles

Baldwin as phonographer

ABSTRACT William Baldwin wrote a variety of kinds of books, but through them all he displayed his skills as a phonographer, as a writer of sound. Geoffrey Streamer’s story about hearing animals speak is the best known of these works, but Baldwin’s compilation of ‘sayings’ of philosophers, his ballading of The Song of Solomon on the model of Sternhold’s Psalm tunes, his noisy tour of Hell in his satire on the death of Bishop Paul III of Rome, the transcribed voices collected in A Mirror for Magistrates, and his ‘funerals’ for Edward VI are all sound-rich books. What is more, the sounds in these books are located sounds. They are associated with particular acoustic environments, and they challenge readers to place themselves imaginatively in those environments. In this respect, Baldwin’s phonographies resemble the art of contemporary sound artists like Brandon LaBelle in Acoustic Territories.

Phonographing Borders: Writing Acoustic Territories in Sinophone Sound Art

Phonographing Borders: Writing Acoustic Territories in Sinophone Sound Art

Noising forth social change: the Orfeón Socialista de Madrid, 1900–1936

ABSTRACTThe following discussion is focused on performances by the Orfeón Socialista de Madrid (OSM, 1900–1936). As they created and appropriated acoustic territories in the city, these performances contributed to the making of local political identities in Madrid in ways that offset the prevalence of journalistic and political discourse, which served primarily middle-class interests. The OSM’s performances lend themselves to being analyzed through the prism of studies on noise because, in order to advance the cause of socialism, they challenged the binary opposition between sound and noise that structured the politics of sound hygiene in Madrid. The latter depended on the ability to manipulate and capitalize on the perception that certain sounds are more acceptable, agreeable and “hygienic” than others, which were in turn perceived as “polluting”, disruptive and unpleasant. The examples discussed here show how, by using noise as a productive force, the OSM tried to resist a well-established tendency to marginalize and persecute those social groups whose sounds or musical practices were tagged as discordant or unharmonious. The likelihood of the OSM’s performances being perceived as “noise” increased as the workers’ movement and its supporting ideologies (socialism and anarchism) came to be seen as a fundamental threat to social order. In this context the OSM used their performances to counter negative biases, raise awareness and negotiate their presence in Madrid’s public space. Analysis of the OSM and other workers’ choral societies can thus offer a unique insight into the ways in which the affective force and transformative potential of choral singing empowered disadvantaged social groups.

What does racial (in)justice sound like? On listening, acoustic violence and the booing of Adam Goodes

ABSTRACTAt the height of public debate surrounding the sustained booing of Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes between 2013 and 2015, several media commentators routinely misheard the roar of the crowd as nothing other than acceptable social behaviour. To ears invested in the established order, the distinction between a ‘boo’ and a ‘boo’ is non-existent; to racialized others, like Adam Goodes, hearing the difference – and calling it out – is an act of resistance, sovereignty, and survival. Taking the booing of Adam Goodes as its starting point, this paper argues for a notion of political listening that attends to the sonic and sonorous histories of racial violence without displacing, or indeed replicating, its wounding effects. I consider the entangled relationship between sound, power and violence, moving beyond the sporting field to examine other acoustic territories where struggles for sovereignty, power and racial justice are playing out. By attending to the ways sound is unevenly deployed to target, silence, assimilate or oppress others along racial lines, this paper hopes to unsettle the listening logic and privileged position of the white, settler-colonial ear, to expose the norms of attention that condition and solidify their appearance.

Mapping street sounds in the nineteenth-century city: a listener’s guide to social engineering

Listening in the nineteenth-century city was regulated by mapping techniques that were specific to that context. Sound mapping did not consist only on locating sounds on a two-dimensional representation of physical space. It also relied on the use inscriptions, laws and discourse to make reality conform to a certain mental map, in which acoustic territories were delimited by concerns and anxieties with the support of economic and political power. Sound mapping technologies were at the service of those who control the narrative of how maps – broadly understood – were meant to be read. Sound control in the nineteenth century city was not subordinated to the supposed prevalence of the visual, but was rather dependent on psychological and legal mechanisms developed in reaction to smell and, related to this, in response to fears of contagion. These sentiments translated into experiments of social segregation such as the planned expansion of Madrid (1860). The appropriation and control of acoustic territories in the city was driven by an interest in protecting lifestyles and class interests. The contingency of the “sound” and “noise” categories made the distinction between them subject to a process of negotiation through which social and moral orthodoxies were established, and marginal groups were controlled or excluded.

Music and the politics of space: Acoustic territories in New Orleans

Municipalities typically seek to control the production and distribution of sound through noise and zoning ordinances. By virtue of sound’s inherent properties, however, such ordinances also regulate public space, though the spaces in question belie clearly demarcated boundaries. This article considers the cultural discourse surrounding contemporary debates about musical performance in public spaces, paying particular attention to the ways in which the politicization and regulation of acoustic space can be levied to curtail and potentially marginalize cultural expression and labor. I take New Orleans as a case study in light of that city’s ongoing debates surrounding musical performance and the regulation of sound. New Orleans provides a uniquely compelling example, as overzealous policing of the soundscape at times conflicts with the role that live music plays in that city’s broader cultural economy. Ultimately, I assess the stakes of these debates while recognizing the contentious and inherently political dynamics at play.

Sales and survival within the contested acoustic territories of Mexico City's Historic Centre

ABSTRACTThe diverse and highly stylised cries (pregones) of street vendors are ubiquitous features of Mexico City's soundscape and audible manifestations of its cultural heritage. Throughout its history, Mexico City's Historic Centre has served as a site of informal commerce. However, the adoption of neoliberal economic policies and the privatisation of public spaces have produced a paradox. While the number of street vendors rises as options for gainful employment dwindle, the criminalisation of their means of subsistence has exposed these individuals to police bribes, confiscation and harassment. Sounds (e.g., street cries, whistles and coded language) are essential to the maintenance of this tenuous way of life. Sounds are used to lure customers, claim territory and execute highly coordinated evasions of police raids. This article explores the specialised listening and sound-making of street vendors and demonstrates the integral relationship between aurality and subaltern resistance in contemporary Mexico City.

Backpacking Sounds

The Bombay film music industry has been dominated by male music composers for the past eight decades. In this essay, the author explores the work of Sneha Khanwalkar, a young female music director who has brought forward new sound practices on popular television in India and in Bombay cinema. Instead of working in Bombay studios, Khanwalkar prefers to step out into the “field,” carving out dense acoustic territories using portable recording technologies. Her field studio becomes an unlimited space as readers see her backpacking, collecting sounds and musical phrases, and, finally, working with the material she has collected. Khanwalkar's collaborative approach to musical sound has challenged genre boundaries between film music and folk music on the one hand and the oral and the recorded on the other. Her radical intervention in sound and music brings together unexplored spatialities, voices, bodies, and machines by foregrounding the process of citation, recording, and digital reworking. Through an exploration of Khanwalkar's work, involving travel, mobility, and a prosthetic extension of the body through the microphone, the author brings into discussion emerging practices that have expanded the aural boundaries of the Bombay film song.

Review of Brandon Labelle. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life . New York and London: Continuum

Where do sounds come from, and where do they go? is the framing question of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, Brandon LaBelle's wide-ranging investigation into the function of sound as a binding, relational medium. This core query is answered with a series of gestures: self- touching, gesturing to the air, touching others. Over the book's course, LaBelle amply demonstrates how much about the acoustic paradigm can be read into this simple (silent) interaction: how sound-and listening-attaches us to one another and to our environments, and the ways in which these attachments are woven into the shared condition of the everyday. In a book about subtle and fleeting connections, any attempts at narra­ tive continuity seem overwrought. Often Acoustic Territories reads more as a collection of standalone essays-three of the six chapters presented here have appeared on their own and carry perceptible shifts in attention and scope-that, when placed together, seem to shatter into myriad discrete points of departure, courtesy of the great wealth of examples. Each fragment begs further interest. In some ways it follows from where LaBelle began in his 2006 historical survey of sound art practices, Background Noise, now juxtaposing case studies and theoretical writing on sound with examples of artistic intervention, intentionally blurring the already vague boundaries between "sound culture" and "sound art," traveling from site to site without historical linearity. In another sense the text is a targeted contribution to the slippery and expanding field of sound studies that examines "the exchanges between environments and the people within them as registered through aural experience" and takes into account the "careful consideration of the performative relations inherent to urban spatiality;' proposing "sound studies as a practice poised to creatively engage these relations" (LaBelle 2010, xviii). Is there any way to speak precisely about sound studies? Constructed as scaffolding onto an open-ended array of established fields (including musicology, sociology, history of art, performance studies, and the study of science and technology), it eschews strict formal boundaries, taking the shape of correlative networks. The 2010 Society for Ethnomusicology an­ nual meeting, held in Los Angeles shortly after the publication of Acoustic Territories, took the theme "Sound Ecologies," foregrounding music's link to discussions of human rights, social action, identity, and environmental

Muting Dissent

This essay examines the regulation of amplified public speech in New York City from 1930 to 1948. It documents the emergence of the public address system as a political communication tool and traces its use by radical organizations and minor parties to expand the acoustic territory of street speech, highlighting the city's efforts to restrict this territory through antinoise ordinances and targeted permit denials. This lingering tension culminated in an “aural panic” after a riot that occurred during a 1939 meeting of the German American Bund, which prompted new municipal and national strategies to bring sound into the arena of permissible liberal discourse. The essay concludes with a discussion of postwar legal challenges to the city's sound device ordinance and their impact on New York's street-based public sphere.

Thinking the city through sound

Book review of Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories. Sound Culture and Everyday Life.

The Advertisement Call ofScinax similis(Cochran, 1952) (Amphibia, Anura)

ABSTRACT. The advertisement call is responsible for attracting females and helps the calling male to keep the acoustic territory by warning other males of its position. This call is species-specific and, because of this, it is frequently used in studies of taxonomy and phylogeny. In this study, we describe the advertisement call of Scinax similis recorded in Mage, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and compare it with the call presented by Haddad et al. in audio form. The advertisement call of Scinax similis is short and composed of one multipulsed note with two bands of frequency of similar intensity. The dominant frequency was found in the second band. The difference in the advertisement call of S. similis from the Municipality of Mage and the call presented by Haddad et al. can be interpreted as variation between populations and/or social context consequences. Between Brazilian species of the Scinax ruber clade, the call of S. similis is similar to that of S. auratus and S. juncae.

Review of Brandon Labelle. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life . New York and London: Continuum

Where do sounds come from, and where do they go? is framing question of Acoustic Territories: Culture and Everyday Life, Brandon LaBelle's wide-ranging investigation into function of as a binding, relational medium. This core query is answered with a series of gestures: self- touching, gesturing to air, touching others. Over book's course, LaBelle amply demonstrates how much about acoustic paradigm can be read into this simple (silent) interaction: how sound-and listening-attaches us to one another and to our environments, and ways in which these attachments are woven into shared condition of everyday. In a book about subtle and fleeting connections, any attempts at narra­ tive continuity seem overwrought. Often Acoustic Territories reads more as a collection of standalone essays-three of six chapters presented here have appeared on their own and carry perceptible shifts in attention and scope-that, when placed together, seem to shatter into myriad discrete points of departure, courtesy of great wealth of examples. Each fragment begs further interest. In some ways it follows from where LaBelle began in his 2006 historical survey of art practices, Background Noise, now juxtaposing case studies and theoretical writing on with examples of artistic intervention, intentionally blurring already vague boundaries between sound culture and sound traveling from site to site without historical linearity. In another sense text is a targeted contribution to slippery and expanding field of studies that examines the exchanges between environments and people within them as registered through aural experience and takes into account careful consideration of performative inherent to urban spatiality;' proposing sound studies as a practice poised to creatively engage these relations (LaBelle 2010, xviii). Is there any way to speak precisely about studies? Constructed as scaffolding onto an open-ended array of established fields (including musicology, sociology, history of art, performance studies, and study of science and technology), it eschews strict formal boundaries, taking shape of correlative networks. The 2010 Society for Ethnomusicology an­ nual meeting, held in Los Angeles shortly after publication of Acoustic Territories, took theme Sound Ecologies, foregrounding music's link to discussions of human rights, social action, identity, and environmental

Synthetic listeners and synthetic performers

Each partner in a collaborative music performance must also be an expert listener. Several “performers” have been built for a variety of musical situations, and each given a listening skill that permits it to substitute for a human performer. This typically entails real-time pitch detection of an instrument or voice, matching the events heard against an encoded score, then adding its own part in synchronization. Necessary skills include ultra-sensitivity to changes of tempo, and the ability to improve by learning from rehersals. This has worked for a broad class of performance situations: Baroque flute/harpsichord, 20th century violin/piano, and some jazz standards—in all cases, music that can be known from a score or by acoustic repetition. Some attention has also been given to how humans first negotiate unfamiliar acoustic territory, such as perceiving rhythmic structure in a piece not heard before. A real-time auditory model of rhythmic perception and cognition (running on a desktop machine with audio I/O) suggests that the neuronal processing involved in foot-tapping to unfamiliar music may be relatively inexpensive as human tasks go.

Female mate selection in the natterjack toad: active choice or passive atraction?

Variation in seasonal mating success among male natterjack toads (Bufo calamita) was influenced by the number of nights that males spent at the pond and by male body size. Large males produced louder and lower frequency calls than small males, and maintained larger acoustic territories. After arriving at the pond, one half of all observed females mated with the first male they encountered. The remainder visited several males before initiating amplexus, but no criteria could be identified that females might have used when deciding whether to accept or reject a male. Movements between several males seem to be best explained by low female responsiveness to male advertisement calls on cold nights which were nonoptimal for oviposition. Females attempted to reject non-calling males both before and after amplexus, but this may be a mechanism to avoid mismating with males of the common toad (Bufo bufo), an explosive breeder that utilised the same pond. In two-choice playback experiments using synthetic advertisement calls, females showed no preference for calls based on their frequency. Females preferred calls of intermediate pulse repetition rate equivalent to those produced by a male at the same body temperature. Pulse rate is thus potentially subject to stabilishing selection and may be an important character for species-recognition. Females preferred fast rather than slow call rates, but only when the alternative rates were extreme. They also preferred calls which they perceived at the highest sound pressure level, but did not discriminate between absolute sound pressure levels of alternative stimuli at different distances. Since females that delay mating and oviposition may suffer predation, it is suggested that female preference for loud, rapidly repeated calls may be adaptive in the sense of minimizing the costs of locating conspecific males, rather than maximizing the probability of obtaining a high quality mate. Competition between males to maintain large acoustic territories and produce calls that can be easily detected by females would seem to be a sufficient mechanism to explain the evolution of the striking calls produced by male natterjacks.

Female choice, male strategies and the role of vocalizations in the Australian frog Uperoleia rugosa

Males of Uperoleia rugosa call from aggregations around ponds in south-eastern Australia on warm, humid nights between September and February. Within the aggregations the males maintain an acoustic territory; they attack calling intruders that are smaller than themselves, but retreat from larger intruders or become their silent satellites. Only males call. They produce three distinct vocalizations: (1) an advertisement call that attracts both males and females, and is used to maintain the male's spatial distribution; (2) an encounter call which is used in territorial interactions; and (3) a courtship call that is only produced when males perceive a female in their immediate vicinity. Females only visit the pond when gravid and spend three or four nights moving slowly through the aggregations of males, apparently listening to a sample of males before initiating amplexus with one of them. Females placed between two loudspeakers playing recordings of the advertisement calls of a heavy and a light male always select the calls of the heavier male. There is a strong correlation between the weights, but not the lengths, of males and females found in amplexus; females select mates that are about 70% of their body weight. Females undoubtedly choose particular males on the basis of acoustic cues; if amplectant pairs are separated, the female consistently returns to her original mate, despite repeatedly being released beside other calling males. The probable acoustic cue is dominant frequency (kHz) which is inversely correlated with the callers' body size and weight. The mating system is a lek, in which males compete intensively for exclusive display sites that contain no resources for females or their offspring, and females sample the displaying males before selecting a mate.