Experiencing sound, p.20
Experiencing Sound, page 20
Or do they? Common experience suggests that we seek heightened consciousness, excitement, passion, and intensity as long as we can be confident that the excitation will return to its resting state. If it were interminable, it would be intolerable. Freud, observing that the ultimate resting state is death, asked why the organism does not simply short-circuit itself. His memorable answer was that each organism wants to die in its own way. The path back must somehow be the right one.
This principle applies both to the little deaths of endings and the big death of ending. The big death cannot be argued with. But the other journeys in life and art that aim to reach home, whether it be the place we started from or somewhere we have never been, do not end for long. No aim is final, no aim the “real” aim. Life intervenes, as life does. The value of the end, both what it means and how it feels, depends on how we understand, always incompletely, how we got there. But it also depends on the knowledge that we can never stay there. We come to rest—then come to all the rest. The sense of well-being that comes with the binding of free energy is real and distinct and transient: necessarily, desirably transient.
But what, to go home to our question, does sound as the metaphor of cosmos have to do with it? What does sound have to do with it at all?
The answer may be as simple as this: quiet. Recall that when Jean-Jacques Rousseau went searching for a condition in which he was conscious of nothing but his own being, he came to rest on the sound of a flowing stream. Quiet—not the absence of loud sound, absent though it is, but the continuous positive presence of soft sound—both supports and embodies the feeling of being “attuned” to the world and momentarily needing nothing more. Quiet is often hard to come by, but doing without it is even harder. Quiet keeps self-organizing systems humming. It does not solve the hard problem, or even come close, but quiet at its fullest makes us feel as if the problem has solved itself. For a little while we can hear ourselves being. And for a little while, that is enough.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. See, for example, Emily Thompson, The Soundtrack of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Jason Camlot, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) and The Race of Sound Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
2. Lawrence Kramer, The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
3. Henry James, The American, ed. William Spengemann (New York: Penguin, 1986), 135.
4. Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector (New York: Scribner, 2002), 160.
5. Elena Renkin, “How the Brain Allows the Deaf to Experience Music,” Nautilus, July 22, 2022, https://nautil.us/how-the-brain-allows-the-deaf-to-feel-music-238516; Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich, “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” Senses & Society 73 (2012), http://anthropology.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/helmreich_friedner_sound_studies_deaf_studies.pdf; Anabel Maler, “Songs for Hands: Analyzing Interactions of Sign Language and Music,” MTO 19 (2013), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.13.19.1/mto.13.19.1.maler.html.
1. JUNE 24, 2019: THE WIND ON MARS
1. Kenneth Chang, “Hear the Sounds of Wind on Mars, Recorded by NASA’s InSight Lander,” December 7, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/mars-wind-sounds.html.
2. LISTENING FOR THE LLAMAS
1. Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Homer and John Ashbery,” New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2018.
3. AUDITORY EPIPHANIES
1. This segment is drawn from my post “The Truth in Sound” on the University of California Press blog, September 19, 2019, www.ucpress.edu/blog/46462/the-truth-in-sound/.
2. Lorraine Daston, “The Coup d’Oeil: On a Mode of Understanding,” Critical Inquiry 45 (2019): 307–31.
3. Augustine, Confessions, trans. and ed. Albert C. Outler, book 8, chapter 12, www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/augustinconf.pdf.
4. SOUND AND WORLD
1. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 26–28, 204–5.
2. Augustine, Confessions, trans. and ed. Albert C. Outler, book 1, chapter 6, www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/augustinconf.pdf.
5. LISTENING TO SILENCE
1. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, ed. Jonathan Warren (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 2021), 20.
2. For a comprehensive account, see Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4ʹ33ʺ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
3. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, “Review: A Haunting Tribute to Josephine Baker Arrives at the Met Museum,” New York Times, January 18, 2019.
4. Julia Bullock, “Perle Noir: Meditations for Joséphine,” https://juliabullock.com/projects/met-residency-perle-noir-meditations-for-josephine/.
6. CALM SEA: GOING NOWHERE, HEARING NOTHING
1. Here and hereafter, poetry in the public domain that is readily available online is printed without specific citation.
7. PRISONS OF SILENCE
1. Charles Dickens, “Philadelphia, and its Solitary Prison,” chapter 7 of American Notes (1842), www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva344.html.
2. Oscar Wilde, The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Nicholas Frankel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 373, 379.
3. Wilde, The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, 341.
4. Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 198.
8. JUST ONE SOUND
1. As quoted in Simon Critchley, Bald: 35 Philosophical Shortcuts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 4 (Critchley’s emphases removed).
2. Critchley, Bald, 5.
3. Critchley, Bald, 6.
4. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 192.
9. SONG AND SOUND
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, in Collection complète des oeuvres, www.rousseauonline.ch/pdf/rousseauonline-0060.pdf; my translation from chapter 16. “Symphony” here means any nonvocal music.
2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage et al. (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1969), 1.1.23-29.
3. William Butler Yeats, Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1952), 377.
4. Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1963), 426 (German), 427 (English); translation modified. Goethe’s wordplay takes “Unerhörtes,” the unheard-of, literally; the word also carries the sense of the outrageous or unprecedented.
10. ALREADY MUSIC
1. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. A. S. Kline, book 6, lines 707–9, www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilAeneidVI.php.
11. COMING ALIVE
1. On ancient reading practices and the controversy about them, see (among many others) R. W. McCutcheon, “Silent Reading in Antiquity and the Future History of the Book,” Book History 18 (2015): 1–32.
12. THE VOCAL TELEGRAPH
1. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (New York: Penguin, 1996), 305–6.
2. Melville, Typee, 44.
13. THE RAVISHED EAR
1. Quoted in Alex Ross, “The Dizzying Democratization of Baroque Music,” New Yorker, February 18 & 25, 2019.
2. Homer, “The Odyssey: Book 13 (Poetic Translation by George Chapman),” https://allpoetry.com/poem/15544159-The-Odyssey--Book-13--Poetic-Translation-by-George-Chapman--by-Homer.
14. CAMPANILES
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), aphorism 628, p. 198.
15. CANNONADES
1. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David P. Womersley (London: Penguin Books, 2000), chapter 68, part 3.
2. Gibbon, History, chapter 68, part 3.
3. Gibbon, History, chapter 68, part 3.
16. SOUNDLESS HEARING
1. Since 1975, when Edwin Gordon coined it, the technical term audiate has referred to the ability to hear music in the mind’s ear. But it may be worth noting that when I typed the term into this note, Microsoft Word flagged it as a misspelling. What remains symptomatic is the lack of any general term for unsounded hearing.
2. Hart Crane, Hart Crane’s “The Bridge”: An Annotated Edition, ed. Lawrence Kramer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022), 127.
3. Fiona Macdonald, “The Only Surviving Recording of Virginia Woolf,” BBC.com, March 28, 2016, www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160324-the-only-surviving-recording-of-virginia-woolf.
4. “The Maid of Amsterdam,” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Navy_Songs/The_Maid_of_Amsterdam.
5. Macdonald, “The Only Surviving Recording.”
17. THE TALKING DEAD
1. Quoted in Dan Piepenbring, “The Sound of a Voice That Is Still,” Paris Review, May 7, 2015, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/05/07/the-sound-of-a-voice-that-is-still/.
2. Piepenbring, “The Sound of a Voice That Is Still.”
20. BELLS
1. Felicia Hemans, “Oh, ye Voices Gone,” from The Winter’s Wreath (1829), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_of_Felicia_Hemans_in_The_Winter%27s_Wreath,_1829/Song.
21. DIS/EMBODIMENT
1. “Johannes Brahms. Talks and Plays.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRcMPxbaDAY.
2. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Story of the Japanned Box,” Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia, www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Story_of_the_Japanned_Box#The_Story_of_the_Japanned_Box.
3. On the posthumous marketing of Caruso’s voice, see Richard Leppert, Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 97–164.
22. THREADS
1. John Banville, Snow (Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2020), 77.
2. Banville, Snow, 49.
3. James Joyce, “The Dead,” The Literature Network, www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/958/.
4. Banville, Snow, 230.
24. SHORTHAND
1. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” http://paradise.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/Viktor_Sklovski_Art_as_Technique.pdf (translation slightly modified).
2. Sandy Florian, “Phonograph,” www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57164/phonograph-56d23a62da3ca.
3. This and the subsequent quotations are from the British Library Sound and Vision blog, https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2019/09/sir-isaac-pitman-phonography-and-the-phonograph.html.
25. POEMS TO MUSIC
1. Thomas Hardy, “Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune,” in Moments of Vision (London: Macmillan, 1929), 8, www.gutenberg.org/files/3255/3255-h/3255-h.htm.
2. Thomas Hardy, “Lines to a Movement in Mozart’s E-Flat Symphony,” in Moments of Vision, 58.
26. GROOVES
1. Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (New York: Vintage International, 2015), 96.
2. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), 591–98.
3. Robert Pfaller, Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
27. GROOVES II: SPACING
1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 68–69; Jean-Luc Nancy, Expectation: Philosophy, Literature, trans. Robert Bononno (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 143–45.
2. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 198.
3. Woolf, Between the Acts, 188.
4. Woolf, Between the Acts, 201.
28. BEYOND ANALOGY
1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; New York: Routledge, 2002), 17–45.
2. Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 10.
3. In The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 52–53, I suggest an auditory basis for the power of referral. Jean-Luc Nancy similarly regards an auditory phenomenon, resonance, as what makes the referral of one thing to another possible; see his Expectation: Philosophy, Literature, trans. Robert Bononno (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 145–47.
29. PHONOGRAM AND GRAMOPHONE
1. On the packaging, see Jason Camlot, “The First Phonogramic Poem: Conceptions of Genre and Media Format, Circa 1888,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=jason-camlot-the-first-phonogramic-poem-conceptions-of-genre-and-media-format-circa-1888. On postcards, see Rainer E. Lotz, “Phonocards & Phonopost: History,” www.lotz-verlag.de/Online-Disco-Phonocards.html.
2. Camlot, “The First Phonogramic Poem.”
31. EPITHET
1. John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021), 173–208.
2. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), 152; the term also occurs twice elsewhere.
3. Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, copyright page.
32. MESMERIZING SOUND
1. “Concent” is an archaic term for harmoniousness—in context, for consonance, perhaps specifically the so-called perfect consonance of octaves and fifths.
2. My translation from F. F. Hurka, Scherz und Ernst in XII. Liedern, 2nd ed. (Dresden: P. C. Hilscher, 1789), via Google Books.
3. My translation from E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Die Automate,” Zeno.org: Meine Bibliothek, www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Hoffmann,+E.+T.+A./Erz%C3%A4hlungen,+M%C3%A4rchen+und+Schriften/Die+Serapionsbr%C3%BCder/Zweiter+Band/Dritter+Abschnitt/Die+Automate.
4. Felicia Hemans, Poems (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1868), 42, via Google Books.
33. CATHAY
1. Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems Translated from the Chinese (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), University of Pennsylvania, A Celebration of Women Writers, https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/lowell/tablets/tablets.html.
2. Yunte Huang, “Chinese Whispers,” in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 56.
34. NIGHT. A STREET. NO LAMPS.
1. Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (London: Chapman and Hall, 1841), chapter 16, p. 23, via Google Books.
35. THE RESONATING CURE
1. For more detail on this episode, see Harry Goldschmidt, “Schubert und kein Ende,” Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 25 (1983): 288–92, Lisa Feuerzeig, “Heroines in Perversity: Marie Schmith, Animal Magnetism, and the Schubert Circle,” 19th-Century Music 21 (1997): 223–43; Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 231–34; and my “A German Dance: Music, Mesmerism, and the Glass Armonica,” in A Companion to Sound in German-Speaking Cultures, ed. Rolf Goebel (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2023).
2. The painting can be seen at the website of Emanuel Von Baeyer, London, Master Drawings and Selected Paintings catalogue, www.evbaeyer.com/catalogues/Master-Drawings-and-selected-Paintings/schnorr/.
36. THE VOICE OF LANGUAGE
1. Martin Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 1971), 188–97.
37. NOCTURNE. ANOTHER CITY.
1. Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (New York: New Directions, 2008), 325.
2. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 1805: IX.82–85.
3. The translation is mine.
38. ANNALS OF SLAVERY: A VIOLIN
1. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, NY: Derby and Miller, 1853), chapter 15, p. 217, via Google Books.
2. Compare Frederick Douglass on the “holiday system” in My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass55/douglass55.html, 255: “The holidays become part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrongs and inhumanity of slavery. Ostensibly, they are institutions of benevolence, designed to mitigate the rigors of slave life, but, practically, they are a fraud, instituted by human selfishness, the better to secure the ends of injustice and oppression. The slave’s happiness is not the end sought, but, rather, the master’s safety.” My thanks to Michael Klein for referring me to this passage.
3. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 245.
