When electroacoustic music, taken in its broadest sense as in this journal, is visited by a critical cultural studies scholar, such as Mark Peter Wright, I usually have an ambivalent reaction. On the one hand, our under-theorised field – and particularly its less prominent component, namely field recording – can potentially benefit and learn from the scrutiny of a more broadly-based assessment by an ‘outsider’, but on the other hand, will they lack the practical experience and familiarity with the creative process of the ‘insider’? I have seen the resulting pitfalls, such as when a cultural studies student posited that field recordists regard their audio representations as objective or idealised documents, hence value-laden, something no practitioner would ever be guilty of, given how many decisions and subjective choices go into the actual process. Fortunately, Mark Peter Wright does not fall into this one-sided form of cultural criticism, being an experienced recordist and reader in critical sound practice and Director of CRiSAP at the London College of Communication.
The four chapters, plus a lengthy Introduction and Conclusion in Listening After Nature, are based on his extensive experience as a recording artist, critical thinker and, clearly, a provocative lecturer. In fact, the chapters often resemble lectures complete with first-person anecdotes (he describes his listening experiences particularly effectively), complemented by short pithy examples (often of the ‘low hanging’ kind preferred by most lecturers that at least get the point across to undergrads) and a rather idiosyncratic set of critical terminology and extended metaphors. These chapters are liberally sprinkled with provocative rhetorical questions, seldom actually answered but left to simmer. As a caveat, I recall John Cage’s aphorism (in Silence): ‘the questions … seem more intelligent than the answers … until the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.’ In Wright’s case, the final section of the Conclusion, in my opinion, achieves that goal best.
Throughout the text, Wright keeps asking the question about recordings as to what we are not hearing. He generally means the historical, political and economic context of sound recording and its subject matter, but he could easily include the more basic lack of full sensory experience other than the auditory. In my view, this sensory reduction often motivates the sound artist/composer who wishes to communicate with an audience to choose sounds that are more vivid (not just recognisable) and evocative, along with the entire panoply of electroacoustic manipulation and compositional strategies to do just that. As Walter Branchi states, we are composing ‘through’ sound, not just ‘with’ sound. Wright advocates a complementary process as ‘listening-with’, a practice that strives for meaning, not just identifying sonic signs – and in fact, his book might have been better titled as Listening-with Nature. Combine this with Tim Ingold’s (Reference Ingold and Carlyle2007) insight that ‘sound is what we hear in’ and Jonathan Sterne’s admonition to the digital humanities to ‘argue through sound’ (he singled out the World Soundscape Project as having done just that for decades), and we see how our language with sound can be more inclusive and subtle about the aural process, rather than being based on objectification, by use of these lowliest of prepositions.
Wright uses an extended metaphor of the ‘low frequencies’ of sounds in a recording to refer to the missing context, a kind of search for metadata, although he might also be referring to wind noise in the microphones, which it appears he wants to free from the audio practitioner’s sense of undesirability. However, most listeners do not seem to relate mic noise to the turbulence of wind in their ears, and so it is not clear that such noises reinforce a sense of technological presence other than as an intrusive artefact. To take the metaphor further, low frequencies are what we feel, rather than what we hear, but maybe the comparison does not extend that far.
The other substitute term that Wright uses throughout the book is the ‘Noisy-Nonself’, a reference to the seemingly addictive norm that recordists do not want to include their own soundmaking in the recording. This is clearly an imperative of the commercial industry that can be traced back to maintaining the illusion of ‘fidelity’ between the original and the reproduced, hence the supposed transparency of the electroacoustic process, ideally blurring its disruption of the acoustic process at either end. Indeed, as any teacher of audio can verify, it is particularly difficult to get students to use their own voice to add a first-person perspective to their recordings, and despite valiant attempts to break that habit, I still do not know whether they are just shy and lack confidence, or have a phobia about using their own voice creatively.
In fact, running commentary, aural history and story-telling, which have been staples of radiophonic work ever since the beginning (none are mentioned by Wright), are generally also eschewed in the electroacoustic community, despite the positive reactions of most listeners to the human voice, perhaps as an antidote to its inherently disembodied nature. More recently, writers such as Isobel Anderson and Tullis Rennie (Reference Anderson and Rennie2016), along with Iain-Findlay Walsh (who only appears in the Notes), are advocating self-referential commentary in EA work, but they are not mentioned either. Neither are text-sound compositions (except Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk), such as the brilliant piece Window Pain by media philosopher Frances Dyson, which combines two vocal levels (first-person and poetic) with sounds of medical technology related to childbirth, thereby giving the piece a feminist theme.
There are many such absent voices in Wright’s book, which, overall, comes across as highly critical, with little acknowledgement of more positive contributions by long-term practitioners in the field (no pun intended). For instance, R. Murray Schafer and Bernie Krause are criticised for describing nature in terms of Western musical concepts (e.g. orchestral composition). In fact, I definitely prefer not to do that either (maybe coming from the next generation after these pioneers), but I understand those metaphors (and Schafer’s much-criticised lo-fi and hi-fi terms) as rhetorical devices intended to communicate their radical new ideas to a broader public.
However, the most serious lacuna for me, in terms of Krause’s (Reference Krause2012) groundbreaking work, is that he challenged the Western scientific norm of isolating the sounds of individual species, as if for taxonomical collection (as noted by Wright), by recording acoustic environments as a whole. He then discovered a foundational principle of the bioacoustic habitat, known to us today as the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis (ANH). Krause heard, and objectively demonstrated, the interlocking nature of the acoustic habitat in terms of non-overlapping frequency bands of soundmaking. Similarly, Schafer put the emphasis on the acoustic ecology of the social habitat, regarding the soundscape as its perceived version, where all the aural elements worked in relation to each other as a system, not as individual signals or ‘messages’. Today’s landscape ecologists now recognise the ANH as an accepted fact (as one can tell from the standard abbreviation), just as acoustic engineers, particularly in Europe, are now officially incorporating perceptual methods into their research, something their traditional training largely excluded. All of this stemmed from critical listening and innovative methods of field recording.
In the first two chapters of Wright’s book, he reviews (once again) the excesses and horrors of the intertwined Western traditions of colonialism and capitalism to which we are heirs. The point is to relate this history to the current environmental crisis, the degraded planet, the ‘crisis of the Anthropocene’ that is largely caused by these traumas. Anecdotally, we learn that Alexander Graham Bell dabbled with the racist philosophy of eugenics, as did Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, and according to Wright, ‘sonic media was part of the same colonial project that produced the physical exploitation of materials, places and peoples.’ And then on to early ethnomusicologists, who like Carl Stumpf, viewed collecting and archiving sound as ‘a necessary corollary of our colonial aspirations’. Fortunately, Wright includes an introduction to the groundbreaking work of ethnomusicologist Steven Feld in Papua New Guinea, which inspired him to posit an aural epistemology of place (‘acoustemology’ in Feld’s term), which depends on sound creating relationships in acoustic space with both human and nonhuman agents. But Wright also emphasises that Papua New Guinea has been a significant site of resource extraction.
Capitalism also comes in for extensive criticism, as it must, and in Chapter 2, Wright picks on the low-hanging fruit of animal sounds being sold as a commodity, ranging from the bizarre (dog barks tuned to a popular Xmas song) to the environmentally sensitive (the widespread sales of Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1970), around the time that idealised nature soundscapes (usually artificially constructed) were first marketed. At the grotesque end of the endless supply of examples is Thomas Edison executing an elephant using electricity, which was filmed in 1903 to promote both electricity and his film technology. These examples are used to exemplify the Western philosophy of the ‘domination of nature’ – a belief arguably dating back to the Enlightenment era – that is in dire need of revision today.
The chapter also tackles the thorny question of nonhuman agency and consent, and the paradigm of ‘sonic trophies’ – the hunt for wondrous sounds from the natural world. Or the lack of sounds, as in Gordon Hempton’s activities as a ‘sound tracker’ to discover the quietest locations free from anthropogenic noise. Questions of ethics abound, but oddly, Wright does not discuss any of its most articulate proponents – his countryman John Drever (using only his article on soundscape composition in the notes), Andra McCartney (Reference McCartney2016) from Canada, David Monacchi (Reference Monacchi and Rudi2011) in Italy and Leah Barclay in Australia. Soundscape composition, which mainly grew out of the World Soundscape Project’s documentary and pedagogical work in the 1970s, is only mentioned in passing as producing ‘elegiac’ works.
The chapter ends with an odd twist towards the subjects of mimicry and Foley sound. Mimicry in this case is found in a recording of a trapped fawn-breasted bowerbird from Papua New Guinea imitating mechanical and human sounds it has heard – a case of nonhuman recording, it would seem. However, in the context of birdsong and extinction, Wright hears it as anxiety-producing, one that destabilises listening in the knowing that all is not quite right. He then transitions to the ‘fakery’ and fictions of Foley sound, a long tradition of creating post-production sound effects in films. Its use in nature documentaries, along with stereotypical voiceover and music, is particularly problematic (and manipulative). Wright, however, suggests that Foley techniques can ‘unsettle prototypical representations of nature’, and be both playful and critical. Perhaps, but I’m sceptical, particularly since in my current work, I am taking a much different approach, that of blurring the distinction and hierarchy of human and natural sounds, allowing our listening to experience the interior ‘voices’ of the elemental sounds of water, wind and earth. This involves micro-level working within the sounds themselves (again, the telling preposition), not imposing ‘language’ onto them or around them.
Overall, I would have preferred a discussion of how recording and media technology changed the range and function of listening itself, from distracted listening to background sound at one end of the spectrum, to focused analytical listening, such as in the electroacoustic studio, on the other. And, by extension, how the listener became a consumer, thereby putting into the contemporary context the marginalised roles of the electroacoustic sound artist, who often seeks rather to create an alternative aural experience than the commercial norm. Instead, we get more extended metaphors about the ‘Noisy-Nonself’ of the recordist such as monster, parasite and white noise disruptor. Admittedly, these epithets are softened through their subsequent elaboration and do not end up seeming quite as obnoxious as one might have first expected.
Chapters 1 and 2 do conclude with discussions of actual field-recording-based documents, such as Christopher DeLaurenti’s soundwalk through a tunnel beneath an abandoned nuclear power station (but unfortunately not his more famous WTO protest recordings with their overtly political issues). These artistic examples are generally used to illustrate Wright’s arguments about field-recording norms and transgressions against them.
Chapter 3, ‘Stretching Site’, seems the most convincing of the book, and I would like to think that it is because it has more input from environmental sound artists themselves, expressed through their projects, particularly those that concern the ‘sites and sound of anthropogenic entanglement.’ These examples include the topic of oil, in Peter Cusack’s work, Oilfield Soundwalk 1, and Mikel Nieto’s multi-media project Dark Sound. Next, Wright deals with the infra- and ultrasonic worlds captured by specialised microphones and transducers, in the work of Jana Winderen and Joyce Hinterding, and lastly the sonification work of Andrea Polli (in Bianchi and Manzo Reference Bianchi and Manzo2016). An appropriate addition to this list might have been Jacek Smolicki’s numerous projects involving sites of trauma, some of which employ innovative vocal and visual contextual material, rather than the more ‘omniscient’ commentaries that Wright criticises. This chapter, devoted largely to practice-based work with insightful discussion by the author, seems to achieve the best balance of theory and practice that is needed by the field. It also includes an alternate approach to the usual dichotomy of what he terms ‘contact zones’ (of the recording site) and ‘elsewhere fields’ (their subsequent audition and processing), where they are made more porous with each other, at least conceptually.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the final chapter, ‘Following the Flow’. It is largely an extensive and depressing quest for how the materials and tools of our technology have been achieved at the expense of the environment and its workers. First is a discussion of the natural resources that make field recording possible, including a soundwork by Fernando Godoy about a copper mine in the Chilean Andes. Next is where Wright attempts literally and geopolitically not only to dissect one of his microphones to get access to its components, but also from there, to uncover their origin and trace their international travel (the mic survives). The third is about the issues of extraction and waste, and soundworks that follow renewable energy, such as the work of Linda O’Keeffe about wind turbines.
Wright also introduces the concept of ‘eco-sonic’ but without reference to some of its most experienced practitioners, Matthew Burtner (Reference Burtner2011), or Jonathan Gilmurray’s (Reference Gilmurray2001) excellent discussion of the range of approaches by environmental sound artists, both available in this journal. Although I am all in favour of anything that can promote environmental responsibility and more rational models of energy management, including the ‘circularity’ of products, and that all of this huge dilemma needs to be discussed with today’s students and everyone else, I wonder if this is the right place to do so, at least to this extent. I am more interested in what artists – who are much more likely to have grappled with the same issues today and throughout their careers – are coming up with, both critically and creatively.
Fortunately, the final sections of the Conclusion make a valiant attempt to rescue us from the ‘hope gap’ that is all too lacking today. In fact, readers of the book might want to dip into this section earlier in their reading if they start being overwhelmed by the critiques of the earlier chapters. Teachers will likely be interested in some of the group exercises that Wright uses with his students, which are briefly described. But as Wright says, he wants to ‘unsettle the silences and erasures in which universal norms grow’, and ‘it is clear that critical practice pushes ethical responsibility, whether pressing record or pressing play’. Despite its own gaps and idiosyncrasies, Listening After Nature is a provocative tour through a creative practice that raises some of the most pressing questions of our time.
