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Don't know who's asking questions.
Answers: Jacek Staniszewski, musician, art critic, co-editor of
Neurobot, one of the first internet magazines deals with sound art and
'aural studies', http://neurobot.art.pl
What is silence for You? Is it a relief or anxiety?
In the
context of twentieth century esthetics, silence is so heavily
mythologized and additionally subject to an ideological manipulation
that it would practically require forming distinct, extremely
individualized meshworks of meaning. Separating silence from the
philosophy of silence and silence as a text would be appropriate. Spaces
of silence are determined on the cultural level, or on the level that
seems more essential to me – that of physiology, genetics, biological
process, specimen’s disposition. I do not intend to contest the silence
as a notion or phenomenon. I am only wondering whether silence embodied
as a physical appearance is not solely available (in the ontological
sense) in artificially isolated environments, such as anechoic chambers,
sensory deprivation labs etc.
As majority of phenomena registered
by means of senses, silence can act – depending on numerous variables –
in an entirely contradictory manner. There is an infinitely large number
of possible silences, as well as states of anxiety.
Do
you remember the moment when you were conscious of the sound in a
creative sense? Did you find any differences between the sound and the
music if any?
I am not able to recall any specific moment even
with an approximate precision. It is possible that I noticed the
possibility of influencing my surroundings at an early stage of growth,
shaking my cat-shaped rattler toy. It is equally possible that
pantokratic fullness of intervence came to me a bit later, using Russian
junior-sized accordion (which, however, disappeared from my view rather
quickly, what seems understandable to me now). I have to say that I am
not convinced that during childhood, especially in its early stages,
such clear-cut and mature distinctions as between music and sound are
being made at all. After all, no kid is Von Helmholz. Between-station
hum and frequency chatter, heard on a pocket Neva 402 radio, was also
bringing fractured bits of musics and skeletal rhythms. It has nothing
to do with idyllized image of childhood as a realm of primordial values
and non-distinctiveness. This recollection rather serves to make a
statement on children being connected to the sphere of audible in its
totality in a very special way; they do not have to employ many
filtering mechanisms, which later ‘normal’ modes of social functioning
depend upon.
A lot of research try to discredit the leading
eyesight sense, yet the hearing sense is a minor case. Of course we
don’t mean the superiority of the senses but not seeing the potential
which lies in other of them. How can we use human hearing sense?
It
would be good to believe that there are certain possibilities for
synesthesia, if not as fully realized grand project, techno-utopian MIT
Media Lab package, then certainly as modest, not necessarily based on
technology, fit for individual usage and needs. Paradoxically, such
low-level experiments with perception are often unwittingly undertaken
by persons looking for an escape from daily routine and boredom by means
of various ‘recreational drugs’, or in other cases (on the general,
less severe for an organism, but potentially destabilizing psyche)
assorted meditational practices, states of trance and other varieties of
New Age illuminations. It is still not certain whether deregulation of
perception is possible to obtain on the non-technological level on one
hand, and unconnected with pharmacology and mysticism lite on the other.
Also, it would be interesting to try to come up with a conclusion
whether such states are in every case desirable or evolutionally
substantiated.
Above all, the sense of hearing should be used for active listening, recognizing, ordering and making distinctions.
What sounds do you find most irritating? Which ones are soothing?
Mass
media create exceptionally irritating soundscape that, in certain
situations, can serve as an impetus for committing an act of
plunderphonics, creative sampling, or detournement. In other situations,
it just comes as another truncheon beating miserable, dwarved and
disoriented citizen of the 21st century cultural space on the head.
Obviously, not everyone is enabled to use this varied material as an
entry point or a source; not everyone perceives this strategy as
meaningful. Such an approach would also be seen as a good one, to
paraphrase Genesis.
Back then, I used to take a rest while
listening, or just letting it flow, to Hindu ragas and minimal
compositions by the likes of La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Tony
Conrad, Eliane Radigue etc. Today I tend to try to stay away from the
obvious.
We know that sound is a good way to possess the
space. The amalgam of the city sounds which make noise is ambiguous. On
the one hand it doesn’t represent nothing but a technological function,
eliminating the silence ( or the sounds in-situ), on the other hand it
is abstract, so it can transform into musical pulp which enables the
space control. Do artists and scientists still perceive the ecology of
sound as socially and politically communicative, transgressive or
enabling critical activity?
‘Acoustic ecology’ has its concrete
relation to intellectual inheritors of R. Murray Schafer, and all other
thoreticians and practitioners that were prone to accept main knots of
Schafer’s thought, with their connected methodologies. As is the case
with all other schools of thinking and institutions, also here (after
nearly 40 years since term ‘soundscape’ has been employed by Schafer)
certain routinization of approach can be discerned, which can result
from universal usage of advanced methods of sound recording and
processing on one hand, but also with general ‘viscousity’ of ideas in
modern times on the other. Certainly, this does not mean remarks and
life work of Schafer himself lost their validity. It would be enough to
recollect some original and continuously actualized concepts that made
appearance in his writings, such as ‘sonological competence’,
‘schizophony’ or ‘audioanalgesic’ mode of treating sound. Question
regarding transgressive nature of acoustic ecology implies the existence
of borders that ‘sound activist’ has/is enabled to transgress in order
for his work to granted ‘radical’, ‘politically involved’, ‘critical’
tags. But the fact of commodification of experimental music in general,
and of the entrance of sound art (as installations, interventions,
real-time situations etc.) into the global gallery space can create the
circumstance where anti-system, anti-Empire (here, referring more to,
popular in certain intellectual milieus, visions created by Hardt and
Negri, although Schafer himself has been writing of ‘sound imperalism’)
oriented sound art would be indissolubly connected with economic,
professional, inner circle-based and highly hierarchic state of affairs
which (or the part/s of which) it tries to contest and criticize.
Controlling of sound environment and selected social group by means of
salvation from other state-, institution- or system-based control traps,
effected through economy of sound (establishing the level of excess and
deficit) remains, after all, another act in the overall control scheme,
although usually enacted using much subtler, ‘soft authoritarianism’
methods.
Gugliemo Marconi believed once that we can hear even the
oldest sound adapting the right apparatus. Do you think that sound can
resist the trace of time?
Sound has no specific age. Only
artefacts and media can grow old, become obsolete, undergo erosion,
bitrot and deletion, or – quite the opposite – be subject to
conservation, recreation despite missing or damaged elements etc. As in
many other ‘civilian’ technological usages, also in this case police
laboratories and experts working for government agencies and special
services do some pioneering work. But it is mostly restricted to digital
media, where recreation of certain logical series is ‘just’ a matter of
processing power and appropriate algorithms. At the same time,
rejuvenation of common archaic medium of damaged shellac 78 rpm record
is a task which even most sophisticated technological tools are not able
to accomplish. ‘Sensible devices’ from Marconi quote should be
obviously understood metaphorically – not as a technology mastering
time, but as development of highly indidualized means of accesing
various temporal loci.
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