1 Sonic Recurrence: Echoes of “Listening as a Shared and Social Practice”

The history of the rise of the modern since the sixteenth century has been associated with the emergence of vision as the privileged sense for perception and for ideas about the subject and its relation to knowledge. —Ana María Ochoa Gautier in Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (13)

Organized by members of the Great Lakes Association of Sound Studies (GLASS) in conjunction with the Department of Visual Art at the University of Regina, “Listening as a Shared and Social Practice” took place October 7–8, 2022, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

On Lost Notes

Zooming in on the picture I can make out in my scribbly hand the phrase “restoration of the sensorial to perceive our relations to the world otherwise,” followed by multiple question marks. Did I have doubts? Was this meant as a line of inquiry? How do we restore the sensorial? What deteriorated it in the first place? Shifting concentration to the sonic presumably counters the outsized influence visuality has historically accrued in the formation of knowledge. This perceptual shift suggests a way to challenge handed-down regimes of colonial and capitalist rationality rooted in specific alignments and hierarchies of the senses—the techniques of the so-called objective observer, the colonial and gendered gaze, the violence of anthropological scopophilia, taxonomy, and measurement. One of Robinson’s interventions in the presentation was to shift the concept of interpellation, provoking us to consider what it means to be hailed not by the authority of the state but by the non-human. What kind of subjectivity could be (or has always already been) produced in the process of listening to and turning toward land, water, the greater-than-human, the nonbiologic, the cosmic otherwise? Perhaps it is easier in the end to see the world as an extractable resource, and less so to hear it as such.

After the conference, while waiting for my flight home, I made a social media post with a handful of images and a pithy caption. Reviewing it now, I’m left unconvinced. If I was listening, then what do I remember hearing? And if my notes are lost, what sonic approximation can be gleaned from or incited by the conference’s remnants—the daily calendar of events, the biographies of artists and presenters, the descriptions of workshops, screenings, and performances, or the photographs and videos made and shared along the way? One thing is certain and without need of documentary corroboration, “Listening as a Shared and Social Practice” was my ideal conference. This is partly because of its focus on the phenomenal, psychic, and social qualities of listening, a topic I am intellectually and creatively dedicated to. But it is also because of how the conference (should we call it a conference?) moved away from standard academic structures and traditional disciplinary practices, which can feel like enclosures at times. Instead of proceeding as a series of sound studies panels and artist talks followed by the routine Q and A, we cycled through different modes of constructing and sharing knowledge: scholarly presentations, performances, workshops, reports on projects, and convivial gatherings. Hospitality was a welcome part of each day’s proceedings. The result was a non-linear experience of potential connections and echoes, as opposed to a sequence of already worked-out conclusions.

Remember the Remains

On the first day of the conference, after registration, coffee, welcomes, and a round of presentations, the organizers screened Kunįkaga Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkaga Remembers the Welcoming Song (2014), a video work by Sky Hopinka. It begins, appropriately, not with an image, but with two voices. Hopinka’s grandmother, speaking Ho-Chunk, says, “It’s good to hear you!” They laugh and Hopinka replies, “How are you?” She answers, “Oh, I’m doing good.” Although the exchange is brief, it situates the everyday sound of greetings and good relations as the inaugural aesthetic experience. For the next few minutes her voice is paired with footage shot from a car’s rear window as it travels along a rural highway during a storm. The feeling of looking back while moving forward strikes me as an ontological condition of the bereft, the pained, and the anticipatory. Expanses of grey clouds darken the landscape while Hopinka’s grandmother reflects on Red Banks, the ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk. Nearby headlights glow through the water-streaked glass shimmering in long bands on the wet road. She says she wanted to know where it was, so she went, but it was really nothing.

Undaunted by the anticlimactic experience, she pivots and talks instead about the stories she has been told about the place, recalling the work of a Ho-Chunk historian. A copy of the pamphlet she references is archived in Chicago at the Newberry Library, one of the largest public research collections in the United States. The imposing building, with its grand marble staircases, reading rooms, and vaults of books, manuscripts, and maps, is a fifteen-minute walk from Lake Michigan, the same great body of water that Red Banks is nestled on. It is also a short walk from Magnificent Mile, one of Chicago’s premier shopping districts for luxury goods. In a pamphlet titled “Hochunk History: A Glimpse” (1990), Dr. Charles J. Kingswan writes that “Hochunk are here to stay. The Great Lakes region has hosted ice age glaciers no less than eight times in the last past million years, each living glacier scouring and moulding the countryside, gouging fingerprints of giants as a legacy to fill the legends of people yet to come.”^[1] Direct familiarity of a site remembered is folded into the overlapping histories and stories told and retold through the stories and histories of others. Hopinka’s grandmother jokes about the absurdity of colonial discovery, prompting Hopinka to ask for the Ho-Chunk name of Red Banks. “Moga shootch,” she says, then concludes by explaining that the shore there is made not of sand but of shells.

Aside from being central to Ho-Chunk creation, Red Banks is supposedly where French trader Jean Nicolet landed in 1634 while searching for passage to the Pacific. A turn-of-the-century mural painted in the courthouse at nearby Green Bay depicts his arrival. Given the brevity of the historical record, it can’t be definitively known where in Ho-Chunk country (i.e., present-day Wisconsin) he landed, or if he landed anywhere on Lake Michigan. Nevertheless, the painting depicts Nicolet standing triumphantly on a rocky hill in the centre of the image. Wearing a long, colourful robe and with his back to the lake, he fires two pistols raised overhead. Puffs of black smoke linger, cartoonishly frozen at the end of the barrels. Shades of yellow, orange, and red saturate the horizon as the sun rises behind him. A group of Indigenous people plead in the lower parts of the painting as they dissolve into the landscape and foliage. Silent, yet full of sound, the painting’s unabashed symbolism requires no unpacking. It is the typical idyllic settler-colonial image produced and reproduced in the form of murals, sculptures, paintings, reliefs, architectural adornments, and monuments in large and small cities all over the United States—in banks, offices, postal buildings, courthouses, town squares, and various state and private structures. Such images are endemic to the myth of the nation’s gleaming surface made possible by its disowned underbelly. The video cuts to brief shots of a landscape taken at different times on a cloudless day. The up-close sound of walking on shells and lapping water redefines the sensorial space of the visual frame. Perhaps it is Red Banks. If so, the audio is so intense and closely recorded that human-scale expectations are defamiliarized. It’s as if the viewer’s surrogate ear is hovering just above walked-over shells and splashing, slapping lake, forced close to the history of the ground, to hear a counter-history told, as Kingswan writes, by the “fingerprints of giants as a legacy to fill the legends of people yet to come.”

Acoustic Spatiality

Before the day’s lunch break, Amanda Gutiérrez led a group of us out of the small theatre, one of the main locations where the conference took place. The Aural Border Thinking Workshop, designed to move us through a handful of liminal zones, began down the hall in a large office space. A sizeable sunken lounge took up the centre of the open interior. We stepped down and made a circle, buffered by a deep-purple carpet, built-in seating, and tabletops where students could work and socialize. Our eyes moved upward into the vast atrium where multiple levels of administrative offices encircled us. Muted palettes and the textures of cast concrete, glass, brushed steel, dark slatted wood, and the occasional indoor plant joined together in the common theme of minimal modernism. Thin metallic letters glowed saintly under the directional recess lighting, demarcating various managerial departments associated with higher education. Gutiérrez prompted us to absorb the site, to describe it, to link form to function, and to listen. What we heard was not so much the ambient sounds of the workplace as our communal experience and understanding of how space makes meaning. Listening never unfolds in a value-free atmosphere; it is perpetually inflected by the material and emblematic site of the encounter. Encased but not bound by our embodiments, we stretched our necks toward the elevated offices above and we experienced together the hushed but felt power of school as a corporation.

Next came the library, which we entered by passing under a network of arched white columns leading up to a ceiling of diffused light—the moody, slumbering gothic cathedral replaced by the promise of industry and illuminated reason. Gutiérrez gathered us by the elevators and instructed us to take the emergency stairs to a designated floor. Being attuned to the potential of the sonic, we could not help but transform the process of going up the enclosed stairwell into an impromptu collaborative sound piece. Our collective footsteps thudded and echoed throughout the concrete and metal shaft. More adventurous folks stomped for emphasis. We tapped and thumped the metal banisters, made unexpected noises, and bathed in the charming, chaotic noise of our bodies as they moved through space. We were instructed to browse for a few minutes and pick out a book to discuss with the group. After noting a few options, I settled on Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference (1993) by Henry A. Giroux, which among other things, and to my surprise, addresses the neoliberalization of education—another theme I am preoccupied with. When I got back to Chicago, I found a copy in my school’s library and assigned a few chapters to a graduate seminar on critical pedagogy and social justice. I think we all got something out the book, despite its being published in the early 1990s, which is indicative of the ongoing battle between private financial interests and the open commons of studying with others.

The workshop ended outdoors in a small, sun-filled grove of leafless trees. Our instruction was to walk the area while saying the names of BIPOC professors, scholars, and friends who have impacted our practices. I started reservedly, unable to spontaneously think of names, intuitively knowing the list must be long. As the exercise continued and as we crunched our way through the thick bed of fallen, dried leaves, people entered my thoughts. I started with my partner, Deanna Ledezma, my colleague Nicole Marroquin, my friend Anthony Romero, and then broadened my list to include John Akomfrah, bell hooks, Stuart Hall, Dylan Robinson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Teatro Línea de Sombra, Walter Rodney, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Lugones, Edward Said, Salvador Allende, Jennifer Ponce De Leon, Nick Estes, Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, Arthur Jafa, Fred Moten, Sandra de la Loza, and many, many more. Names and feelings of gratitude came easily and overwhelmingly. We passed each other in the cracking, leather-brown leaves of late fall and early winter, muttering to ourselves, concentrating on the concurrent role of others in the historical construction of the self. Here and there I heard a name I recognized and felt as though I’d been brought into a secret society of multitudes. A part of learning may be institutional, but, reflecting on the names I selected, only a few were ever assigned to me formally in class. For the most part I have, like many folks of colour, come to my political and theoretical education through informal, circuitous paths that trace and reject the forced routes of diaspora, of borders dividing people, of migrations taken up out of desperation.

The Audio Social Life of Ducks

Fereshteh Toosi’s sound walk, “Listening to the Dawn Chorus,” began, as the title suggests, before sunrise. Getting up, dressed, and to the university by 6:30 in the morning took resolve, not only because of the cold, but knowing the rest of day was planned into the evening. Despite the early hour and snappy temperature, a group of us gathered inside the entrance of a designated building. After a round of introductions and stretches, we left the warm comfort of the indoors and strolled a few hundred metres north toward a nearby wetland conservation area that included a small body of water. Despite Regina being over a thousand kilometres from Lake Superior, something a member of the Great Lakes Association of Sound Studies brought up on the first day, both regions are geo-historically linked, having once been shaped by an ancient glacial ice sheet stretching from North America to the Artic Ocean. As we approached the somewhat diminutive Wascana Lake, but before we could see it, the soft then noisy sounds of ducks slowly began filling our senses. Louder and louder as we got closer to the source. Polyphonic squawking. Wings skimming the water in long, skittering streaks as they landed on the lake. The beating of water and whipping of air as they gathered speed to take watery flight. Coming over a small hill we finally saw them, a grand assembly of ducks collected in different congregations across the lake. The limitless audioscape of avian social life stunned us in its breadth and unexpectedness. Toosi asked us to divide into pairs. One person closed their eyes and the other guided the walk along the shore. After a set amount of time, we switched.

The most common and inattentive idea about nature is that it is serene, quiet, at peace, balanced, innocent, pre-lapsarian, and harmonious (the list of descriptors is long and interchangeable)—terms that are not so much about nature as much as our attempts at culturally understanding our inconceivable cosmic context. Much in the same way that the idea of nature has been naturalized, the idea of peace and quiet has been internalized as the central condition of contemplation and rationality. By contrast, noise is the de facto sign of irrationality. An important process of the history of colonization and settler colonialism takes place within the domain of the sonic—the mandate of silence and the joining of the other to the sounds of the other-than-human. Yet, how sound functions in the constituting of our material and aesthetic worlds tends to be dispersed, hidden, or only discerned in the obfuscated subtexts of history, not to mention the subtexts of the present. How were ideas about sound and sounding used to further entrench who was and was not considered human, rational, and ordered? If we sound out too discordantly in our sonic social lives, will we be linked to the cacophony and irrationality of a commune of ducks gathering in a little lake? The society of ducks has no interest in our ideas about the tranquility of the countryside or about society. Whether it was noisy or not goes unsettled within a sonic imaginary that equates nature with quiet and discord with culture. Reimagining the ducks as performing a chorus suggests a therapeutic reorientation and perhaps even restitution of the senses so that we can begin to tune out the pre-established rhythms of thought that over-determine the horizon of what is imaginable. Maybe then we can also begin to attune ourselves otherwise, as a receptive audience to the agency and sovereignty of fowl—and not only to their sonic compositions and the compositions of their land, but also to the greater-than-human temporalities and durations of time those choruses invoke. In the long arc of geologic time, we were still in the Great Lakes region, even if our common understanding of water, land, what it supports, and what supports it, are shamefully reduced to the pleasure or profit we gain through allotment and extraction.

Spectrum of Spaces

After the plenary conference presentations and Q and A sessions, we gathered one last time in the school’s performance art classroom. Over the days of the conference a handful of events had unfolded in this space: a talk about a musical youth camp (Girls Rock Regina) and a band of young musicians called Phoenix 5ive; a presentation on a Web-based instrument using weather data and seismic activity to trigger and arrange various sonic clips by sound artists into unique compositions; a virtual performance involving the injection of testosterone into a snare drum head, making the instrument a part of the gender-affirmation process; an immersive sonic experience featuring curated and mixed geophone recordings of oil extraction sites in West Texas. Outfitted with a large mixing board, a computer, projector, large screen, and some memorable speakers, the room had been a model listening and performance environment. Incorporating this kind of media arts space throughout the conference allowed for the intermittent centring of the epistemological and ontological qualities of creativity and sound, not only as something to reflect on, but as something to experience and be immersed in.

Conference organizer Lindsey French worked previously with their Introduction to Sound Studies students to make an eight-channel audio installation, Spectrum of Spaces, which played out of a set of space-age-looking monitors. Each speaker stood about the height of a person and was mounted to a stand with castors so they could be easily wheeled around. Positioning the speakers all over the room transformed the act of listening into a kind of audience choreography. The act of moving through space, locating different sound sources, and moving again, was like experiencing a living crossover fade. Common-sense notions of listening frequently hinge on the idea of immobile but heightened attention. The image of the static body’s ear turned toward a sound magically suggests thoughtfulness, openness, and the anticipation of understanding. But by and large our listening experiences are on the move, both in the material and symbolic sense. Positional listening describes the material condition of listening, how listening always takes place from within a site, which, like the subjectivity of the listener, has also been shaped in the forges of institutionalized social relations and the always imperfectly erased materiality of prior eras of oppression, resistance, and what happens in between. How do we tune into the afterlives of the sonic, and how does the sonic conjure the spectre of space? These are the kinds of questions the conference and the students’ installation left me asking. In the same way, this text also haunts the space of the conference, all the provoking ideas I encountered, my own specific history of criticality, and the afterlives of the various power dynamics that shape our presents and imagined futures.

Endnotes of Listening

To what degree does listening to certain sonic practices, seemingly insular and private experiences, contribute to the ontological and epistemological design of novel acoustic intersubjectivities? Describing listening as situated, shared, and social emphasizes its embodied and contextual orientations, doing away with the notion of the universalized listener atomized and floating in the unnamed and abstract space of common-sense interpretation. Although complex, the social theory of subject formation as a process contingent on our historical narratives and learned sensorial frames of reference helps to clear away the binary idea that subjectivity is defined either by the social or by the individual. We can theorize, instead, how the individual is part of a commonly produced but ever-changing interpersonal process of self-narrated identities, group identifications, aesthetic productions, and spatializations. The notion of us and them, of the one who belongs and the one who is the unrecognizable stranger, is at least partially defined by what we listen to, who we listen with, and what constitutes a listenable/intelligible sound. Focusing on listening and sounding practices gives socio-political criticism and historical analysis a chance to attend differently to sensorial information, balancing overly common scaffolds that prioritize visibility in knowledge production and the articulation of social life. While the act of listening as a metaphor and practice can carry with it the activist values of reception, connection, and mutuality, it is also open to use by the state and dominant society via noise surveillance. Understanding something called “noise,” for example, is contingent on the following questions: Noise for whom? Defined by what standards? Under what conditions and resulting in what consequences? Similar questions or frameworks of contingency define how sound and listening function, whether in terms of the liberatory imagination or the control society. Where these two modes of deploying and defining sound and listening converge tends to be the most engaging terrain for understanding the power of listening practices for both state authority and communities of resistance.