2.1. The technologically shaped ear

The recording microphone always confers an aural perspective, and affords the possibility to empirically investigate, by ear. The contextual relation between representational sensory experience and tradition, as mediated by the microphone and field recording bears some consideration. Perceptual learning is facilitated by recording technologies, shaping the aesthetic ground. It has had an important place in the production of public spaces throughout the Middle East, ‘possessing unprecedented powers to control the social and political imagination, powers that appealed to the heart and the ear in new ways’ (Stokes Reference Stokes2009: 56). An obvious Egyptian example (supported by the state via tax breaks) is the ubiquitous use of the microphone–recorder–loudspeaker triad to broadcast the (often pre-recorded) adhan into populated spaces, ensuring at least awareness – if not the actual practice – of the requirement to observe religious duties. This overt aural disciplining is complemented by a more diffuse and subtle shaping of listening, impacting on performance style – both musical, and on recordings of tilawa (Qur'anic recitations) – that has arisen with mass media extensively developed and utilised onwards from the Nasserite era in the Egypt of the 1950s. My focus on the Egyptian case arises from two considerations – firstly, many of my field recordings were made there and, secondly, Egyptian culture has historically ramified as a model throughout the region. As Stokes (Reference Stokes2009) observes in his specific analysis of the microphone in the secular work of singers such as ‘Abd al-Halim and Umm Kalthoum, the microphone afforded the intimate and emotionally inflected voice to circulate widely, fusing the emotional and persuasive power of music (both tarab and ‘atifiyya), with the hegemonic desires of the state. The microphone, with its linkage to recording (and so to collective memory) and to broadcast (and so to both public discourse and private reception) became a key technology whose influence has been both celebrated and lamented. This technological shaping of perception has been characterised by Stokes (Reference Stokes2009) as part of a new ‘techno-political complex’ (after Mitchell (Reference Mitchell1992) and Abu-Lughod (Reference Abu-Lughod2004)) which marries entertainment and politics, romantic love and coercion, and aligns to the aspirations of the state to exercise power, to co-ordinate, plan and discipline, asserting tacit norms of reception and relations between the individual and the social. The Egyptian state in the 1950–60s, where the politics of the left presided, was far from Islamic, but laid the foundations. Recording technologies afforded the development of a music industry that asserted a pan-Arab identity. My focus here is on the way in which, with a rise of more proscriptive Islamic ideologies, these same technologies of recording have been pressed into the service of religious discourses, initially having been resisted by religious authorities, but now fundamental to the way in which competing ideologies are aesthetically inscribed in the recordings, competing through distribution networks.

2.2. Surveillance and the electronic ear

In addition to the officially sanctioned uses of recording technology, I turn to the unsanctioned in the form of auditory surveillance. In travelling and recording, especially in Egypt, I frequently met with initial suspicion, and became aware of a reflex of paranoia when the visual presence of a microphone was apparent. Suspicion of any kind of recording is common enough anywhere; however, I was struck by the response in Egypt. The socio-political conditions are highly relevant, where surveillance (by networks of local village co-operative informants, the Egyptian police, and extending back to the coercive techniques deployed by the British colonial powers) has a long and ignominious history, against which most feel powerless (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind1987). My initial strategy for avoiding reactions of fear was to use binaural in-ear microphones. The more or less, invisible ‘technological ear’ allowed a mode of covert recording. However, ethical issues then arose, as I could not obtain informed consent. I discussed this concern with a number of sound artists from the Middle East regions. Tarek Atoui (from Lebanon) said that during the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, he had been put in detention for three days for making recordings in Beirut, and received a police beating (although he gives varying accounts). Similar stories emerged in discussions with Mahmoud Refat (Cairo) and Charbel Haber (Lebanon) about confiscation of equipment, unwelcome police attention, and detentions, as well as direct interventions by ‘concerned citizens’ who were immediately suspicious of intentions (Mazen Kerbaj (Lebanon)). As the project progressed it became increasingly important to me that I make the recording process apparent, in part because I was seeking high-quality recordings, but mainly because in remaining covert I was avoiding the possible repercussions of being observed in the recording process. I came to feel that this avoidance was ethically unacceptable. Given that I was less subject to local constraints, it felt important for me not to acquiesce, and to take seriously the idea that the act of recording might itself constitute a form of sonic activism. I therefore moved to a highly visible Sennheiser MKH418S, complete with furry Rykote shield. This switch resulted, in its most benign manifestations, in attention from streams of children who would shout messages. More interestingly, the visual signifier of the microphone triggered people to give voice – once they were convinced that I was not a state security operative – and to comment on the conditions of their own lives and regional politics, and also to ask questions about me. Now the project was in danger of becoming a series of roving vox populi interviews. As that was not my intention, these recording have not been used. A perhaps more revealing result of my greater visibility as a sound recordist was attention from state officials, and I include below an example of one interchange that encapsulates the paranoia and control of the state and ambivalence towards the permissibility of the sonic that I frequently encountered (and shall discuss further).

2.3. Listening case history: the tomb of Sultan Hassan, Cairo, Egypt (2007)

Following negotiation with the muezzin, he is happy for me to make a recording. He does not get paid for his services and lives well over an hour away; yet, on a near daily basis for much of his adult life he has travelled to the mosque to give the adhan, performing du'a. It is jumu'ah, and the khamaseen wind is blowing hard, reducing visibility to a fine red powdery hue, and muffling the city outside. Sheltered from the hot winds, the tomb of Sultan Hassan is a cool, darkened and huge tiled space, beautifully inscribed and brightly reverberant. It is empty save for an Egyptian friend, the muezzin and myself. His body posture changes from Cairene languidity to that of the observant man: hands clasped loosely around prayer beads and with downward gaze he clears his voice, lifting his head and directing his voice with his right hand, in sequence to each corner. Shortly after he begins a woman enters, angrily saying that we are doing something haram (forbidden) and that no permission had been granted. As both the muezzin and I continue to be admonished, a number of religious officials arrive, having been summoned by her. I am asked to leave. What follows is a remarkable interchange, as I am escorted towards the care of the Egyptian police and my equipment is impounded. My Egyptian friend is by now locked into a heated discussion around authority and religious permissibility. Who has the authority and agency to over-rule the muezzin's consent? She engages in lengthy explanations of my identity as researcher and Muslim. The exchange continues for some twenty minutes, during which time I find myself sat on the sidelines with the muezzin, counting prayer beads, as he looks on calmly. By now some ten people have been recruited into the debacle. At the main entrance a senior cleric arrives. He is impressively still, and immediately the group falls into silence. There is a brief discussion after which I find myself (and my equipment) being propelled with urgency back into the tomb. I am not allowed to leave and am informed that it is my solemn duty to complete the recording.

3.1. Making

The bird ghost at the zaouia can be encountered in fixed form, as installation or as a live electronics work. No overtly ‘musical’ material has been used, to respect the expressed religious sensibilities of the participants. Instead, a lengthy editing process revealed the interstitial sonic material that was not framed in the ceremonial–ritual context as music, yielding a very large number of fragments or sections (up to many minutes) derived from the field recordings. These fragments were grouped by applying psychoacoustic analysis techniques to identify events by amplitude and spectral characteristics. Although this helped to automate the process of sifting through a large number of sound files, aesthetically it was rather crude and so was augmented by drawing on considerations of space-form by my close listening in the studio, each fragment and section having signature space-form images (Smalley Reference Smalley2007). As anyone who has spent time editing audio can attest, one's memory retains a specific sense of where the audio fragments originated, and so, to my ears, they retained very specific residual ambiences that acted as cultural signifiers. I became interested to know if they bore any meaning for others, and went through a process of playing fragments to other composers, and listeners (many from the region). It became apparent that somehow they carried atmospheres, affects and, at times, directly referential meanings. Even though overt Islamic ‘music’ had been removed, something of the spaces persisted for many listeners. The voicing of the adhan is an obvious and highly specific reference to the Islamic sonic-social context. Birds are a less obvious reference, but fundamental to Sufi cosmology as signifiers of the soul, as already noted. Wind carries similar significances. One translation of Moroccan gnawa is ‘the people of turbulence’ (Pâques Reference Pâques1978). These ‘extra-musical’ references are relevant to locating the sound in a semantic or referential network of meaning, metaphor and association, some personal and others shared. Having grouped and subcategorised, I had a set of organised stem sounds. The term stem is used to evoke associations with both the electroacoustic composition literature and genetic research, connoting ideas of lineages and mutation. Each stem underwent manipulation and evolution through a series of algorithmic networks transforming their spectromorphologies and space-form. The temptation as a composer was to take control and to impose an aesthetic order; however, this was in tension with the realisation that any number of combinations of the stem fragments and their transformations yielded engaging listening.

Rather than yielding a fixed and linear unfolding, the nature of the material suggested that time collapses into a composite accretion of experience in space. What is held in memory loses its linearity, and contributes to a collaged ‘image’ of what has past. Time within the bird ghost at the zaouia is not fixed and sequential, but remains mobile, and is open to reconfiguration from one listening to another. Fragments (lasting from grains below 100 milliseconds, up to extended segments of many minutes) of the original recordings may recur, but do so within the changing context of other fragments and transformations. Sounds may be heard, and reheard, both in their original versions and by lingering resemblances that have been retained in their successive generations of transformed descendants. Although in some sense these sounds are now deformed, denatured and defaced, at times they retain sufficient regularities derived from the stem material so as to be capable of activating memory networks – because either the listener has experienced them in the work, or they may have a familiarity with the sonic-social context from which the material derived.

The piece sustains three possible listening-performance formats. On computer, it is a standalone application that reorganises the multi-channel playback, with a fixed opening and closing section, reconfiguring the intermediate sections. The piece also works as a multi-channel installation where the sonic traces of the field recordings are displaced into the installation's site-specific context. In its third format, the sections are deployed as material for live electronics performance in which the real-time co-presence of composer-performer and audience influences the decisions as to how the material is reworked and diffused in the listening space.

3.2. On Orientalised sound

In the context of a history of the musical avant garde, Kay Dickinson (Reference Dickinson2010) refers to ‘Euroamerican artists arming themselves with fresh new weapons to combat bourgeois stagnancy, extracting and fetishing Oriental music as a way of re-energising practice’. Outside of art music practices, when music arises from non-Euroamerican traditions it often becomes tagged as ‘world music’. I am deeply suspicious of Orientalising tendencies within Euroamerican culture (after Said Reference Said1978), and mindful of the projective opportunities that alterity offers. In the immediate ‘post-9/11’ context, the affective socio-politico-scape of fear, paranoia and pre-emptive power was perniciously pervasive. As a nominal British Muslim I was subject to the polarising social dynamics that prevailed. At one pole was a nascent pressure to deny specific differences with the majority, to assimilate and domesticate as ‘good moderates’, to identify with the aggressor or to silently acquiesce. At the other pole was a pressure for social justice, linked to notions of standing against the oppressors, which invited a path to a possible ‘political Islam’ (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind1997). Neither option in this unproductive binary seemed convincing, as both were reactive constructions in relation to dominant media narratives. Both seemed to have their roots in unhelpful projective evacuations of the problematic into alternately idealised or denigrated representations, depending on what Ghalya Saadawi dubs ‘the ossified politics of identity, and tiresome polemic about belonging and nationhood’ (Saadawi Reference Saadawi2009: 8). The polarities outlined above also played out in relation to how I might use these recordings. I could regard them simply as any other sound source, and bracket out their specificity. The history of acousmatic music that deafly subscribes to Schaefferian principles is one of discarding the originating context of recordings in favour of a reduced listening investigation that privileges the sound itself. This of course has been extensively discussed elsewhere. Practice in soundscape composition informed by acoustic ecology has tended to swing the other way, foregrounding the specificity and uniqueness of location, and risking idealisation.

Returning to the polarities outlined, I was resistant to romanticising and Orientalising the materials, of being pulled into a sonic game of representation and authenticity or of discarding the rich associations of the sounding context. Orientalisation of sound is a kind of sonic tourism that captures the ‘ethnic’ and colonises the ear, and I had to guard against the cultural appropriation of the ‘exotic’ into sound art music (of which there are far too numerous examples). At the general level, sonic Orientalising has tended to press various specific and local music practices into the service of capital, and the global music industry, by acting as sonic surrogates for markers of commodified ‘identity’ and ‘authenticity’. Commercial recordings of various Islamic musics circulate, propagated by the global music industry representing the local, the authentic, the ethnic and Oriental to first-world markets (and increasingly re-presenting these back to their originating communities, in turn reshaping practice). In relation to the market for authentic Islamic music, categorisation by ‘Islamic’ is an imaginary marketing unity, concealing a complicated multi-voiced set of traditions, histories and representations.

At the heart of the bird ghost at the zaouia is a taking issue with essentialising representations of the Islamic – the muezzin call, the picturesque soundscapes, the alterity of the sound world. I return again to the network of meanings of adhan. It can be Orientalised sound par excellence. Its ubiquity within mass media, as bearer of ‘the Islamic’ cannot pass without comment, and so my inclusion of it points both to the ‘West’ and to the ‘East’. Aside from the adhan (recorded mostly as ‘found sound’ in public space) there are no other direct representations of Islamic ‘music’ within this work. For reasons that I am about to come to, this was the direct result of my compositional strategy that took Shariah injunctions to their logical end-point – no ‘music’ is present in the bird ghost at the zaouia.

3.3. On the permissibility of music

In his seminal paper ‘Musicology as a political act’, Philip Bohlman (Reference Bohlman1993) foregrounded the role of the musicologist in making choices and decisions that are essentially political in nature. His is a call for the implicated scholar to reflect on his or her own entanglement with issues of power, and indeed ethnomusicology is now attending to the inscription of power as it ramifies through every aspect of music production, dissemination, representation and reception (Nooshin Reference Nooshin2009: 1). I argue that such considerations pertain equally to the composer who engages in potential transcultural play. There was no way of ignoring the politically and ethically ramified implications of the material for me, and so the composition is a political act that critically engages the cultural context of its source recordings. At times the sonic developments lose cultural references, becoming sound in-itself – which, however, never imagines itself as an autonomous object. I return to Bohlman as a way of fleshing out composition as a political act: ‘belief in self-immunity has historically led to a remarkable capacity to imagine music into an object that had nothing to do with political and moral crises’ (1993: 414–15). Bohlman traces the depoliticising of music as itself a political act of neutering, and he critiques the ‘search for the authentic’ (1993: 421) in which musicology and ethnomusicology have been implicated. Of relevance here is the background assumption of the ‘music object’ (after Eduard Hanslick) as object of analysis, somehow shorn of its socially and politically ramified context. There are obvious resonances with the debates around the ‘sound object’ of electroacoustic practices. Ground assumptions extant within compositional and listening practices that imagine an idea of ‘pure perception’ argue that sounds can be regarded in and of themselves, attended to in a mode of listening that brackets out the referential aspects of how the sound is made, and its contexts. Tacit ethics of ‘correct’ listening (be it reduced, deep, semantic, causal or any other mode) and normative codes regarding permissible compositional approaches to material, such as degrees of transformation, continue in the practice and theory of debates around sound art and/or electronic musics.

I am tempted to refer to such prescribed codes as forms of sonic legislation. Perhaps such a statement needs to be tempered. I do not intend to suggest that those notable theorists who have written extensively about listening (such as Michel Chion, Denis Smalley, François Delalande, Pierre Schaeffer, Barry Truax and so on) do so from a desire to control, limit or otherwise prescriptively delimit our listening. On the contrary, they are concerned with methods of enhancing and developing listening as a sensory discipline. I also note that each of these theorists develops highly nuanced and distinctive positions. However, it is not the detail of their arguments that is at stake here; rather, it is the way in which these distinct paradigms can become taken up, blunted and institutionalised that is of concern. Inherent in the uptake of thought into bodies of work and practice by a community is the danger that ideas can coalesce and calcify into ideologies that can potentiate a sonic jurisprudence, formulating tenets and systematising approaches that can come to legislate modes of engagement, and to discipline the aural in the Foucaultian sense. The ‘sound object’ may have conceptual utility for compositional practice, and, although a valuable aural discipline, it potentially results in reduced modes of engagement with sound. As Randall (Reference Randall2005) observes, ‘power accrues to music because of particular associative meanings’.

If the bird ghost at the zaouia has any power to affect and effect the listener, I wish to include within composition the total social-historical sign; a holistic which includes the sonic, but extends into a full spectrum of vibration inclusive of a wide set of ramified meaning, much of which resides outside of the audible spectrum. Power is apparent in the abilities of a sonic formation to activate an array of associative meanings that both listener and producer are subject to and constituted by; there is a circularity by which production and reception are looped. In the domain of sound and music, the perceptual substrate for this exchange is then the act of listening and encoding in memory – as material is presented, and returns in transformed and surrogate guises, an array of associative memories are activated which will vary depending upon the listeners’ variously tuned sensorium. In the bird ghost at the zaouia, the use (or particular absence) of source material that is specific and heavily culturally freighted has to be admitted as part of the understanding of what the work potentially refers to, and to what it can do. In the case of adhan and Qur'anic recitation, to understand these as a subject of musicological discourse is to apply a framing alien to Islamic thought. Qur'an is recited either out loud or in silence, and relies on pitch and rhythm organisation that are phonological in origin, and link with the elaborate modal system of the maqamat. It is, however, not music. Terms such as ‘musiqa’ and ‘musiqi’ are foreign imports that serve to articulate the space of contestation between Muslim religious practices and the musical practices of other religions and cultures. If Islamic culture itself is a syncretic formation, its sonic cultures are especially so, as the spread of the faith extended and incorporated local traditions. It necessarily exhibited a degree of porosity and decentredness, such that several schools of Shariah exist reflecting differing interpretations of Qur'an and Hadith (primary sources of Islamic authority). As a result, the moral standing of music has a famously long, complex and ongoing contestation (see Farmer Reference Farmer1957; Roy Choudhury Reference Roy Choudhury1957; Shiloah Reference Shiloah2003). These debates have come to be dubbed the ‘sama’ polemic’ by Kristina Nelson (Reference Nelson2001). To generalise, two poles operate – a (broadly) Sufi-influenced perspective that argues for music (under the right conditions) to be itself a spiritual and prayerful practice, through to its opposite, a puritanical perspective that holds that music of any kind is intrinsically blasphemous. Between the conditionally inclusive and outright injunction is the most intensely contested arena – the degree to which tilawa is music, and the role of adhan – which receives a special categorisation as prayer and not music.

The bird ghost at the zaouia seeks to subvert the puritanical ideologies present within certain (in particular Wahhabist and Salafist) schools of Saudi-inspired New Islamic thought, and itself becomes activated and polemical through an intensification of the negative aspect of the sama’ polemic – music is made by resecting out the ‘music’. The (im)materiality of the sonic itself may be aesthetically appraised as music, to apply a non-Islamic frame, as I do when I rework and reorganise the recordings. Simultaneously I look from the inside, and I take issue with puritanical injunctions by transforming fragments to the edge of organised pitch and rhythm. If ethics form codes that regulate social exchanges of power, meaning and identity, these can be engaged and questioned at the sonic level by scrambling the normative codes, with the intention of bringing these to notice. The same field recordings may then be engaged by taking the injunction to its logical extremes, performing radical surgery on the recorded body, resecting out all ‘music’ (as defined by certain Islamic practitioners in their day-to-day understanding) leaving only the interstitial tissue for the ear to hear. This yielded a residuum of sounds regarded as ‘not-music’ within an Islamic framing, but which can be reworked and reactivated in the contexts of a sonic art practice.

Throughout the bird ghost at the zaouia, adhan and sermons are present, mostly in transformed surrogates that hover on the edge of recognisability, usually masked or conjoined with other sounds. Throughout the piece, the adhan becomes technologically mutated. These surrogate deformations potentially become comment, as the transformations do not always respect the intelligibility of the divine word, and invite potential criticism for violating the laws of tilawa (Frishkopf Reference Frishkopf2009: 80). Similarly some transformations result in abrasive noise, scrambling the signal.

The bird ghost at the zaouia offers an intensification of this process of technological effacing, famously discussed by Benjamin in relation to the ‘aura’ of the work of art, with the paradoxical intention of bringing into greater awareness that which is present in its absence. The interstitial sounds that are interspersed between the original ‘music’ become the focus of listening. Within the triad of microphone–recorder–speaker the presence of an authentic practice (of lilat, adhan, salat, dhikr and zar) is exchanged for its aural representation, which in turn, becomes denatured by removal of the sonic signatures of the ‘music’ itself. Nowhere will the listener hear the characteristic instruments of gimbri, ghaita, nay, daf, ‘oud or singing voices. I included adhan when it has been recorded in a space amenable to public listening. In addition to its redesignation within Shariah as prayer (non-music) I assert that this is also a social ‘found sound’ and, as it is projected into a public space, I regarded it as fair game for critical redeployment and transformation. In all other cases I undertook a painstaking editing out of all recognisable sounds that might be misconstrued as ‘music’. The spaces of the mosque and zaouia afforded interesting cases because the reverberated tails of these sounds retained the immediate after-effect of the ‘music’ within the acoustic space. In this process I became intensely aware of the auditory disciplines associated with Islamic rhetorical practices. The onsets of words, the resumption, the pacing of rhythm and melisma became strangely present in their absences as I reduced the material into a set of adjacencies, gaps, throat clearings, breath, and reverberation tails. By strategically taking the extreme position, and using only the residuum of the spaces, the implications of the injunctions against music are traced – I investigate and take issue with the hegemonic reach of the negating aspects of the sama’ polemic.