In 1928, microtonal composer Dane Rudhyar wanted to hear more “dissonant harmony” in the world; harmony that was not “a basic harmony postulated as fact from the beginning, but rather harmony being won every moment of time over conflict and misery.” Beyond a new kind of music theory, this utopian essay provided guidelines for new social and political organizations. Eschewing the naturalistic view of “harmony,” he proposed a decidedly human one, rejecting things like the “the peace of the womb” in favor of people actively coming together “on the basis of responsible action…able to coordinate their different activities so that their group becomes organic and radiates creative spirit, power, health” (source).
There is a lot to critique about this essay—Rudhyar himself disavowed much of his early writings—but the basic idea of dissonant harmony seems applicable to the project of World Listening Day (WLD). Started two years ago by the Midwest Society of Acoustic Ecology and the World Listening Project and now global in scope; I had the chance to attend one of this year’s events in New York City two weeks ago today. It took place at NYU’s Music Technology Program, and was sponsored by the Steinhardt School, the New York Society of Acoustic Ecology, and Ear to the Earth. The event was filled with interesting and creative uses of environmental sounds in a variety of compositional contexts, but as I left the artificially silent “state-of-the-art audio facility” and reemerged into the hot, noisy, New York night, I was left wondering: so what? How does this event promote its stated goal of raising environmental awareness, if at all? What does it tell us or how does it complicate the relationships between sound, listening, nature, culture, and technology? And, importantly, what do we do next? (I really mean “we”: I think WLD is a good idea, and I hope my thoughts here are understood as preliminary, as a way to spark dialogue, and as a way to think about WLD going forward.)
The event at NYU, as well as the larger narrative of WLD, is steeped in Rudhyar’s idea of “natural harmony,” by assuming that listening to the environment (recorded or in person) is in and of itself an environmentalist act. This is stated most explicitly by the organization Ear to the Earth, a representative group that is “based on the idea that listening to the sounds of the environment can connect us to the world with a special vibrancy and understanding.” This kind of transhistorical romanticization of sound and listening (what Jonathan Sterne identifies as a component of “the audiovisual litany”) has three immediate consequences for WLD. First, it allows nearly any kind of environmental sound-related experience, composition, or activity to be covered under the WLD umbrella, regardless of that thing’s actual environmental politics. Secondly, the end result of these sonic practices seems to be the creation, installation, and presentation of “sound art,” as opposed to other forms of environmental activism. Lastly, and relatedly, by insisting on the significance of sound over and against the other senses, WLD willingly blinds itself to larger environmental issues. I would suggest that the way out of these problems is by heading back into them, not by being stricter “environmentalists,” but by turning the microphones on ourselves to ask how human histories, processes, and technologies have changed the way we think about, listen to, and record environmental sounds—in ways that exceed music and sound art and enter the realms of culture, economics, and politics.
One of the first things that struck me while reflecting upon the compositions I heard at WLD NYC was that of the two soundscape pieces I most enjoyed, one had nothing to do with the environment, and the other was a tacit celebration of environmental destruction. Joseph Bartolozzi’s “La Morte c ‘e’ vicina” was composed entirely of broken bottles washed up on a beach in Red Hook. By his own admission, he had no interest in the integrity of the original field recordings, instead manipulating them with a bunch of “basic, juvenile” techniques: pitch shift, time shift, layering, etc. The piece was meant to evoke the mind of a dying man, not the moans of a dying earth. It was “environmental” in the way a charcoal drawing is—in materials only.
The second piece I responded to was Aleksei Stevens’ “Standing Water: A Soundmap of the Gowanus Canal.” By far the most traditionally “compositional” piece of the evening, it was an 18-minute soundscape comprised of 6 movements, each named after a place along the canal (“Hamilton Avenue Drawbridge,” for example). As the composer states in the program, the canal is “infamously polluted,” yet I would describe his sonic portrayal as beautiful: alternately haunting, aggressive, contemplative, and dramatic.
I think these kinds of works present interesting, but not necessarily difficult, questions about what comprises a “soundscape” recording, and the solution here might be as simple as asking these questions somewhere in the program or in the panel discussion. (I’ll take the blame here as well, for not raising them at the time. Many of these thoughts didn’t come to me until later.) A larger question, though, is why environmental sound practices tend toward “sound art” as their end result in the first place. Of the 5 hour WLD NYC program, almost all of it was dedicated to playing compositions in sound studio listening rooms, with two exceptions: one live experimental music performance, and one “soundwalk.” The soundwalk—which I was unable to attend—took place around the NYU neighborhood. While soundwalking does have the potential to be explicitly community-oriented and educational, it is still deeply embedded in sound art and experimental music traditions. (See this essay for a thorough history.) Again, in retrospect, I wondered about flipping the script. Why not “soundwalk” the space we were in, not to marvel at its high technology (as the program would suggest we do), but to ask questions about the very need to create totally sonically isolated chambers in order to appreciate the sounds of the outside world?
Finally, I think that emphasizing sound against the other senses detracts from the broader mission that these organizations hope to serve: increasing environmental awareness. Is that even possible, in a meaningful way, while sitting in sterile sound studios some six stories above the city streets?
Let’s return to the example of Ear to the Earth, who, to reiterate, claim that listening to the environment connects us to the environment. I don’t mean to be glib here, but say I started a group called Tongue to the Table, which was based on the seemingly innocuous notion that taste is a uniquely meaningful way to understand food. Yes—of course!—but that misses an incredible amount of the larger story about food and eating. Those who really care about and appreciate food might say, among other things, that we eat first with our eyes. They might ask questions about where and how food arrives on the table, and they might tell us that one of the real joys of food is making it, sharing it, and discussing it with other people.
While this example is simplistic, I’d still like to suggest that future World Listening Days might include, or even celebrate things such as multiple sensory experiences; explicit questions of ethics and politics in recording practices; discussions of technology and mediation; discussions of “authorship” and audiences; and, finally, the possibility for collective action, community engagement, and education. We cannot treat our environmental sound problems, or environmental sound itself, as the providence of “nature.” These are problems that are noisy, wide-band, and complex. To solve them, we might need to stop re-tuning ourselves towards the natural world, and start re-engaging each other in more meaningful ways, so that our varied sound art, ecological, educational, and academic practices can ring out in “dissonant harmony.”
