Audio Art & Other Pollution
Surrounded by Sound
published in Real Time No.22, Sydney,
1997
Surround
sound is not only the most under-theorized aspect of cinema
(it rarely rates a mention in the preceding half century
of film theory written by deaf mutes), but also the marker
of change for the radical transformation of psychoacoustics
and aural phenomenology in the social unconsciousness of
tactile listening. It is hard to think of contemporary developments
in musical/audio-visual consumption, playback systems, and
broadcast diffusion which do not actively address issues
of spatialization, environment and emersion.
The
critical problem - a delicious one - is that the listening
experience is always full. It arouses and numbs with full
effect. Its presence engulfs so that one becomes one with
the sound, installed in its acoustics. It gets me wet. Yet
noble intellectual pursuit - that effete, winged flight
whose only material effect is the wind from turning the
page of a book - has mostly resorted to either immaterial
poetics (how beautiful sound is) or tedious conspiracy theories
(how controlling sound is) in a vain attempt to articulate
the 'power' of sound. Both miss the simple point: sound
is power.
As
essays, installations, radio works and other texts grow
in number to collectively rout sound into some kind of new
adventure playground, the supposed forefront of Sound Art
proceeds as if the preceding thirty years of Experimental
Music has not happened - or, it is locked in a grim, frozen
time warp. Architectural discourse, global concern, social
theory, urban design, poetic reference, landscape inquiry,
body politics, arcane history - all are invoked to evidence
intellectual depth (and certainly there can be engaging
thoughts in such a practice) but actual sound is all too
often employed as a lexicon of effects which narrowly represent
and demonstrate extant concepts, occasionally stumbling
over obvious correlations (usually tagged by words like
'voice', 'talk', 'ear', 'listen') and holding them up like
marvellous discoveries. Granted that any attempt to theorize
the complexity of sound deserves support under the tyrannical
cult of the eye, but this kind of acultural armchair ponderousness
is irritating and stultifying despite its concerted aim
to explore the environmentalization of sound.
Why
does little of this intellectual pursuit of the acoustic
engage me? Why am I so suspect of its aural practice? Simply
because the experience it grants me is thin, anaemic, withered,
pasty. Because the power of sound - the fringes of its energy
field, the verticality of its sensuousness, the density
of its aura - can sometimes be enough by itself. Because
I have encountered the power of sound in other environments
and situations which lay bare the complexity of its operations
like a freshly filleted living body. Subsequently, my views
of surround sound in the cinema are as much shaped by the
terrain of unexpected aural experiences as by the formal
engineering of the soundtrack. In the unconsciousness of
my own tactile listening - those unprivileged moments when
and where sound snares me and activates my sense of sonar-physical
presence - many audio-visual experiences have carved up
the audio-visual corpus and exposed its fluid machinations.
For
example ...
Doing
some post work in an outer Sydney editing facility, I wandered
into a larger mixdown room. No-one was present, but a large
video screen projected an episode of (from memory) A COUNTRY
PRACTICE. At first I thought it was silently playing, but
then I noticed that the only sounds being audited through
the mixing desk were foley effects - footsteps, clothes
rustling, the odd hand on a door knob. The world of a low-key
serial TV drama was suddenly transformed into a dimension
of subterranean activity where I could hear the minutiae
of human presence - its slight and momentary impression
on space itself. Like the haunting moments in CARNIVAL OF
SOULS when the woman suddenly hears no sound, triggering
an awareness of her displacement from the world and forcing
her to experience an abject invisibility in the face of
others, watching A COUNTRY PRACTICE this way was like being
erased from the world. Through a radical imbalance of sound,
I inhabited a space of which all on-screen action and activity
was totally unaware (they kept on talking to each other
wordlessly), divorcing me from the depicted, driving me
to the de-mixed. Such is the spooky joy of foley work: conjuring
ghostly essences by imaging the sound of an inaudible human
on the audio-visual screen.
When
Masona took centre stage at The Punters Club, Melbourne,
he stood in front of a row of effects boxes lined at his
feet. Not a guitar was in sight. Typical of the sardonic
mimicry of Osaka and Tokyo noise performers, he theatrically
clutched the mic like Iggy Pop, screamed, then held both
hands in the air. At that instant, the most deafening, physical
wall of noise I have every encountered filled every molecular
crevice of the space. Masona stood quivering, like he was
being electrified by the sound. I stood still because the
density of the frequency range felt like I was hearing every
sound in the world, simultaneously and at full volume. An
amazingly crystalline and liberating statement of noise,
generated by a single gesture: the stamping of the 'on'
switch of his chained effects boxes. Again and again, Masona
turned on and off the essential totality of noise with command
and precision. A single maniacal being - far from the pathetic
cool of pithy 'Industrial' acts - he reduced rock to its
most binary form: loud noise that engulfs the body and traumatizes
it beyond movement into a state of critical inertia. That
image from SHINE comes to mind - arms out-stretched, ecstatic,
triumphant, listening to 19th Century music on headphones,
a weedy figure of humanism. Give me Masona any day.
Having
read about the new B.A.S.E. system (Bedini Audio Spatial
Environment) and its ability to illusionistically convey
an 'ambisonic' and/or 'holographic' image of sound in space
(recording pursuits explored throughout the 80s but with
limited results), I eagerly sat down to watch STARK TREK
V. An hour into the film - and after the only interesting
sonic moment was hearing William Shatner sing "Row Row Row
Your Boat" - some alien dude appears who can read people's
mind. Cue for a close up of his eyes and a deep rumble starts
to fade up. OK - this must be the showcase of the B.A.S.E.
system. Suddenly: a deafening crack as the speakers in Great
Union's main theatre blow. The rest of the film emanated
from what must have been the odd remaining tweeter, rendering
the whole soundtrack like what you would hear if someone
was watching a video and you rang them up and heard the
TV in the background through the phone. What with the undying
cultism of STAR TREK and its alignment with the revenge
of computer geeks, I guess this was a visionary statement
about what would become sound on the net: tinny, bitsy and
shitty.
Being
late for the Salt & Peppa concert at the Tennis Centre
in Melbourne meant missing out on the support band. But
rolling up to the front there wasn't a soul in sight. Like,
no-one. Nor could I hear any deep rumble - that thrilling
premonitory sensation that you're about to partake of a
live event. Figuring I had the wrong night, I approach an
open door. A solitary guard looks at my ticket and points
me in the direction of the Stalls entrance. I open that
door, and move down some stairs. A deep rumble is faintly
felt. I get to a sealed door at the end of a corridor. I
open it: the sound hits me hard in the stomach. I'm standing
at the back of the stadium's upper tier, looking down on
a packed audience of screaming teen girls (a few guys here
and there) as Salt & Peppa are humping on stage to a
ground-shaking bass rhythm. Dazed and disoriented, I wind
my way down the steep steps to eventually reach the concrete
floor. As I touch hard ground - still being pulverized by
the deepness of hip hop incongruously pumping through a
hard rock sound system in an outdoor tennis court sealed
like a bunker - I thrill again to the effect of entering
into sound, of passing through a porthole into an alien
aural dimension. It's like being thrown into a strange liquid.
Hip
ad directors still think it's cool to portray 'the city'
as a cacophonous din of pressurized activity. As if Futurism
never happened. As if we haven't already seen the stop-motion
cinematography of KOYAANISQATSI a million times. As if there
can be no pleasure in the existential bustle of massed shoppers
or any emotional thrill in window shopping. Nothing clears
my head more than to sit in the middle a busy shopping mall
(Bourke St mall near Swanston, in Melbourne is the best)
and float on its undulating bed of noise. A Golden Hits
radio station can drive me crazy - but ten clothes stores
all playing similar but different tracks out into the street
is - as Neil Diamond says - a beautiful noise. Buskers -
who are irritating at the best of times - compete with each
other and effectively cancel out the other's identity so
I can absorb their presence as an abstracted, free-form
concantenation of events. Barkers speaking through cheap
portable PA amps vie with each other in a wind-strewn dub
mix of babbling Australian vowels, harshly distorting through
badly-EQ-ed speakers. And nothing beats occasional low frequency
waves as trams pass by, rhythmically clanging their metal
bells as they absurdly traverse a mall which is closed to
traffic but open for people to walk down - so long as they
look out for the trams. All I have described is pleasure,
not pain. Nor is it the outmoded celebration of an anti-music
aesthetic. The outdoor shopping mall and its desperate pneumonic
strategies to aurally direct and acoustically soothe the
city worker/consumer exacts a total collapse through the
overload of information in a sonically saturated spatial
domain. This is the free-market of sound, the Tin Pan Alley
of consumption, the cacophony of the social. You're soaking
in it.
These
kind of experiences (articulated above as purely personal
reflections) affect my perception of cinema's audio-visuality.
Through such experiences, one can un-watch a film, re-hear
its sound design, actively imagine its potential as much
as be engaged at the level of its manifest production. One
can use their sonar-spatial overload as a reservoir of aural
events that can be folded into the cinesonic experience
and the eventfulness which is granted by surround sound's
active placement of the auditor within the film's expanded
diegesis. Filmmakers like Alain Robbe Grillet, Margueritte
Duras and Stan Brakhage each valiantly and effectively argued
against the pursuit of objective authroing and rendering
in their cinema. Their preoccupation with multiple and simultaneous
memory planes, spatial environments and audio-visual sensations
constitutes a fascinating and oft-overlooked recourse to
exploring phenomenological multiplicity without resorting
to the tackiness of 'dream' metaphors or drug-induced visions.
We have yet to fully apply models of surround sound - in
either cinema, multi-media, radio or sound installations)
to their concepts which intuitively prophesied the rampant
and excessive audio-visuality which now governs the most
casual of urban experiences.
