Memory, Space, Sound

Chapter 1

Introduction

Johannes Brusila, Bruce Johnson and John Richardson

Cultural researchers over the past couple of decades have increasingly grappled with the conundrum of how sound, and music in particular, becomes meaningful, regardless of background and disciplinary affiliation. The answer for many has been to situate sounds and their corresponding social and cultural activities within the contexts of space and memory. This triangular relationship has become a key issue in many fields of music research, promising to open up neglected areas of inquiry as well as creating linkages between interests that might previously have been regarded as unconnected; for example, acoustics, film music studies, soundscape studies, sociological theories of space, heritage and memory studies.

Technological developments have made formerly temporally and spatially distant sonic phenomena a part of our present culture in unforeseen ways, many of which are explored in this collection. Technology impinges on our subject in other ways, too. Not only are digital technologies transforming the landscape of our everyday social interactions when it comes to sound and music (Castells 1996; Bull 2000; Richardson and Gorbman 2013; Vernallis, Herzog and Richardson 2013), but they also offer increasingly sophisticated tools for understanding how sound, far from being easily separable from the surrounding physical and discursive world, is closely interconnected with it. There is no such thing as a neutral acoustic environment – one that is not conditioned in some way by an enveloping physical space, which in turn exists by dint of social actions and interactions. How we listen to sounds, with reference to the framing environment or bracketing it out, is thus a matter of choice – one made either unwittingly or with conscious reference to the social norms and conventions that inform the actions and responses we consider appropriate and meaningful. Once we couple sounds and their intrinsic situation-dependency with the memories of those who produce, perceive and respond to them, the plot thickens considerably. These relationships are the ones we choose to navigate, with a view to offering, in the totality of this collection, new insights on a range of topics related to these core themes.

In this book we present a multidisciplinary approach to studying how sound becomes meaningful in relation to time and place. Collectively, the essays endeavour to show how sounds, most frequently their musical forms, are located in actual and symbolic auditory spaces and how they are encoded as part of our cultural and social memory. We highlight relevant theoretical and empirical issues with a particular focus on cultural and social memory, space and place. Drawing on musicology and ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural history, media and cultural studies and other relevant approaches, the themes are explored through analyses of a wide range of examples, including performances, audiovisual material and the Internet. This enquiry in relation to both space and memory produces a synthesis of the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of cultural analysis.

Memory

According to an old axiom attributed to the influential Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, ‘all history is contemporary history’. This is certainly true when it comes to cultural studies of memory over the past few decades, during which there has been a growing historiographical and sociological interest in how the past is understood. Memories are not only individual, but collective, cultural and social (Halbwachs 1992; Assmann 1995, 2011). The past is present in various sites of memory, where cultural memories are crystallized (Boym 2001; Nora 1989). From a musicological perspective, it is interesting to study how our personal musical memories and culturally institutionalized memories construct our ideas of the past. After all, music has a unique power in acts of memory, to bring to consciousness events we had forgotten, to reclaim the past, to activate collective memory, and in doing so regenerate the most powerful sense of community and to laminate more firmly the present over the past.

Research on memory accomplishes much the same thing by sidelining the fictionalizing or reconstructive narratives of traditional histories in favour of the alternative, often more close-up-oriented stories that have emerged in writing on historiography, Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical approaches to discourses, microhistory (e.g. Ginzburg 1980, 1983), critical studies of social groups (including the history of women and postcolonial history), research on autobiography, material culture and ‘the social life of things’ (e.g. Appadurai 1988) and archaeology in the traditional sense (as in Assmann’s writing). Writing on collective memory and cultural memory has more in common with all of the above areas of inquiry than traditional historical research. While a common misapprehension is that memories are fleeting and inconsequential, in contrast to the assumed hard facts of historical textbooks, research in these fields provides compelling evidence that the reverse might be the case: the first-hand accounts of cultural actors – which we find in documents, recollections and personal reflections – often convey more direct and reliable information about experiences across and of history than official accounts. Memories are often, moreover, closely bound up to the world of material objects and social spaces. These are not peripheral by-products of history but affectively loaded crystallizations that offer windows onto the past and the present.

Memory is implicated also with a wide range of contemporary practices where music is circulated in material and immaterial forms. For a long period of time, music was understood to be an abstract art and the material dimensions of music were largely neglected; but during the past couple of decades, musicologists have also become interested in the relationship between the material culture of music and its cultural meanings (e.g. Brusila 2009). Equally important insights into music have been gained by viewing it as a creative activity, so new research is revealing the various ways in which it can be approached in terms of its distinctive ‘thingness’ – as something that can be preserved, owned, exchanged and appropriated. Questions have been raised about how music is preserved as sonic phenomena, material objects and individual and social memories. Music has often been archived as scores for aesthetic, functional and symbolic reasons, but simultaneously it has continued to exist as emotional memories, creative practices and social activities. Now, there is a growing interest for studying the ways in which music is preserved both at public or institutional museums and archives and at the private or individual level in, for example, private collections and recollections (see, e.g., Cohen et al. 2014, and the Australian project Popular Music and Cultural Memory). An interest in the past has also become more important for the music industry, which, as a part of the current ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011), invests in nostalgia, revivals and reissues of previous decades. The development of digital technology has made musics of the past present in today’s media, not least the Internet, in both material and immaterial forms that to a growing extent break old physical boundaries.

Space

The questioning of the idea of ‘autonomous music’ and the increasing recognition that ‘context’ is as important as ‘text’ have brought forward the recognition that, far from being ‘inherent’, musical meanings are largely discursively constructed in dynamic interaction with musical sounds situated in physically concrete places and culturally constructed framing spaces. The notion of ‘framing’ has been around for some time, in Gregory Bateson’s ecological view of human (and non-human) thought systems and interactions (Bateson 1972:183−198), Erving Goffman’s theory of ‘frame analysis’ (1974), Derrida’s deconstruction and, more recently, Mieke Bal’s (2002) ideas about how cultural frames of reference shape our experiences of art. Broadly speaking, what unites these theories is the conviction that frames are understood as ‘determining the type of sense that will be accorded everything within the frame’ (Goffman 1961:20). Derrida and Bal add to this accumulation of knowledge the provocative idea that frames connect with general systems of knowledge that define also what falls outside the frame of reference (see also Richardson 2015). Where we experience music is crucial in several ways. It largely conditions the ‘semiotics’ of the music: the meanings and values we conventionally attach to it. Music made in one place simply has a different valorization from the same music made in another space.

Music has often been contextualized according to locality: in music history often according to nations; in ethnomusicology based on small-scale social groupings that live in a certain place or region; in popular music studies in relation to, for example, certain urban areas. Influences from, for example, cultural studies and cultural geography have also made music researchers question simplified notions of locality; for example, separation of physical place from socially constructed space (Giddens 1990), and the increasing scope and intensity of global and transnational processes, which has led to a ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1989:240). Simultaneously, technological development has changed the ways in which music is produced, disseminated and consumed spatially and geographically. Digital technology and Internet have created new ways of territorializing, deterritorializing and reterritorializing local communities through musical practices (e.g. Brusila 2010). However, sound technologies have not simply provided new conduits for music; they have of course also changed it (e.g. Katz 2010). The infinite reproducibility of music that can be achieved by digitization and the portability afforded by various forms of personal sound systems mean that music may now be experienced by millions in completely different spaces, each of which will be a crucial factor in forming its meanings.

While much of the research on popular music genres in particular has focused on urban spaces and geographies (e.g. Krims 2007), one cannot take for granted that theorizations of urban spaces are the only relevant models. This might explain why researchers working in more sparsely populated regions have taken such a keen interest in fields like soundscape studies and ecomusicology. Some of the defining questions in ecocritical research on music in fact come back to issues of spatial mapping, both within music and beyond its boundaries. Generally speaking, ecocritical research correlates an environmental or non-human frame of reference with a human and cultural one, thereby allowing the emergence of a more expansive perspective on familiar issues (Richardson 2015).

Space is routinely assumed to be something we experience visually, but of course information about space and place is communicated also in sounds. Since the invention of the phonograph, sound recordings have captured and mediated sonic spaces. Research on music technology is now beginning to take this sort of information just as seriously as aspects of music such as structure, form and melody were taken in the past. Musicologists (e.g. Tagg 2000; Richardson 2011: 219−223; Moore 2012:29−44) have asked how the relative positioning of elements in the mix – what Allan Moore calls the ‘soundbox’ – inflects our perceptions of performers and the ‘messages’ they put across – about intimate or distanced, interactional or individualistic modes of performance and so on. Readings of this kind can provide valuable insights into the social functions and position (in a broader sense) of performers and their listeners when combined with other analytical means. Just as sonically delineated space frames and configures experiences of ethnic and racialized space, so it is also a factor in social categories like class, language, age, generation and gender. Moving across ethnic and social spaces requires sensitivity to the notions of authenticity within the different audience cultures. For example, Third World musicians who enter the world music market must apply to their new audience’s sonic ideas of ‘the West and the Rest’ and of world music as ‘local music, not from here’ (Brusila 2003).

Sound

The emergence of the systematic study of sound as a cultural phenomenon rather than as an object of scientific interest may be traced back to the work of R. Murray Schafer’s benchmark study The Tuning of the World (Schafer 1977). His foundational work in the 1960s was conducted with the World Soundscape Project, which included Hildegard Westerkamp, and Barry Truax who authored the Handbook of Acoustic Ecology (Truax 1978/1999). One of the earliest collections outside the World Soundscape Project was the 1994 Soundscapes: Essays on Vroom and Moo (Järviluoma 1994), edited by Finnish scholar Helmi Järviluoma who, with Greg Wagstaff, also published the book Soundscape Studies and Their Methods (Järviluoma and Wagstaff 2002). Järviluoma has built on the foundations set down by the World Soundscape Project and Schafer, the results published as Acoustic Environments in Change (Järviluoma et al. 2009). Other work in the field confirms its interdisciplinary range, including, for example, that of cultural historian Alain Corbin (1999), ethnomusicologist Steven Feld (2012), science historian Jonathan Sterne (2013) and literary historian John Picker (2013). Significant institutionalizations of sound studies include the founding of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in 1993, which now has its own journal and annual conferences; and the establishment of CRESSON sound research centre in Grenobles, France, in 1998.

In the twenty-first century, the status of sound studies has increasingly been validated by ‘handbook’ or ‘encyclopaedia’ compilations that proclaim the interdisciplinary compass of the field. These include The Auditory Culture Reader (Bull and Back 2003), Aural Cultures (Drobnick 2004), Hearing Cultures (Erlmann 2004), The Sound Studies Reader (Sterne 2012), Sound Studies (Bull 2013), as well as more specialized texts as The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900−1933 (Thompson 2004), Hearing History (Smith 2010), Sound: A Reader in Theatrical Practice (Brown 2010) and The Sound Handbook (Crook 2012) (for an overview of the state and directions of sound studies, see Johnson forthcoming).

One pattern gradually emerging in this literature is an appreciation of the convergence of the intellectual and the material in auditory cognition, as exemplified in one of the most recent collections, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Finch and Bijsterveld 2012), with contributions ranging through cognitive studies, acoustic engineering, physiology, ecology, geography and neuroscience. This research has also been one of the most powerful drivers in problematizing the separation between music and sound, and by extension, music and social practice. Sonic phenomena in general are now recognized to be important elements in our understanding of not only aesthetic objects as such, but also art, our environment and the connections between human beings and technology.

As in the case of this collection, a substantial section of that field deals with music, perhaps the most semiotically complex form of anthropogenic sound. Indeed, it is the overlap between soundscape studies and music that has helped to problematize the latter term. For the more conservative branches of musicology, at least until the late 1980s, the idea of ‘music’ was often taken as a given, and studied with a focus on musical works and the study of classical scores. For a great many reasons associated with influences from, for example, ethnomusicology and general changes in intellectual and material culture, the perspectives have widened within music research, leading to a more generous and instructive understanding of the importance of context in addition to text, and raising ontological and epistemological questions regarding the nature and function of music. Resituating music within the larger sonic environment, for example, enlarges our understanding of its social role, as well as the importance of the senses, theories of cognition and technology (see, e.g., Birdsall and Enns 2008). Indeed, the very opposition of text and context is also increasingly problematized in general in recent humanities research, which interrogates the underlying assumptions and corresponding social practices that hold these and other concepts in place rather than taking them as something given or natural (see Bal 2002; Richardson 2015).

Musicology and ethnomusicology are therefore expanding to include ear-opening new perspectives, while interdisciplinary collaborations and mixed methods approaches to the study of music cultures have brought valuable new insights on music and its relations to surrounding cultural forms and practices. A notable example is the emergence of audiovisual studies, among which film studies are of special significance. Studies of film music have expanded understanding of musical meaning and affect and how they operate, in particular helping to conceptually resituate music within contexts as disparate as narratology, cultural theory, sound engineering and semiotics (see, e.g., Chion 2009; Tagg 2012). Much of the recent research on film music and other audiovisual uses of music – in gaming, music videos and live performances, for example – is robustly interdisciplinary (e.g. Richardson, Gorbman and Vernallis 2013). A notable shift has been towards an approach in which sounds and corresponding affects carry as much weight as the traditional means of narrative exposition. This shift has gone hand in hand with a corresponding interest in the sensory aspects of the subject. Recent research is beginning to unpack the implications of what some have called a new ‘cinema of the senses’ (Marks 2000; Elsaesser and Hagener 2010; Richardson 2011; Chion 2013), with reference to disciplinary standpoints including sound design, acoustics, phenomenology and aesthetics and the psychology of listening. These insights are helping researchers to situate experiences of music more convincingly in a multisensory field defined ultimately by the coordinates and capabilities of the human body. Understanding film sound as rooted in the spatialized experiences of embodied human agents augments one of the principal concerns of film music studies, which is to situate sounds against spatial coordinates in the filmed world (or, equally, outside of its bounds).

If awareness of how we experience sounds in the body at one end of the spectrum and as part of the sonic environment at the other end is coming into sharper focus in the light of new research, how we conceptualize and account for the cultural functions and meanings of sounds depends greatly also on points of reference located between these two extremes, many of which connect in some way with ideas about memory or space. All three converge in the following essays.

Contributions, contents of the book

It would be remiss of us to discuss issues of sound and space without acknowledging the salience of social and geographical space in which our soundings about this subject first took shape. This collection brings together work based on presentations given at the international conference The Cultural Memory of Sound and Space, organized jointly by the University of Turku and Åbo Academy University in Turku, Finland, 13–15 March 2013. The range of disciplines and regions covered by the contributors gives the collection great breadth both culturally and geographically. The authors and editors have a very wide international personal and professional background (e.g. Australia, Finland, Denmark, Serbia, Sweden, United Kingdom and United States). The case studies presented in the book originate from different parts of the world and in some cases, they also raise questions of intercultural connections and power relations.

The following chapters also reflect the breadth of approaches and methodologies, with a range of platforms including ethnography, musicology, cultural theory, media studies and archaeoacoustics. In aggregate, these chapters embrace the three elements of sound, space and memory, but individually the balances of thematic emphasis are as various as the disciplinary bases. At the same time, they all demonstrate implicitly if not explicitly that we have never been able to construct any one of them without some reference to the other two. All three are implicated in the construction of sonic meaning; arguably even the neonate arrives with a ‘memory’ of sound and its associations with place, since hearing develops within the womb. No individual can make meaning out of a sound without reference to both space and memory.

The way we have arranged these essays is not at all intended to suggest that the three can be uncoupled. The arrangement reflects a general balance of attention in each essay, but without wishing to suggest the possibility of any absolute quarantine. Detailed synopses of the chapters are provided below, but as an overview, we begin with discussions that on balance lean towards memory: the physical, corporeal construction and preservation of memory in the essays by Heinonen (the proclamation of the Christmas message in Finland), Kaijser (a restaging of a Pink Floyd performance) and the mediated enactment of memory in the essays by Kilpiö (cassette technology) and Long and Collins (music and online heritage). These are followed by examinations of the way in which imaginary and literal space functions to frame memory and sound, beginning with an essay by Cohen on the mapping of musical memories. Gligorijevic explores the literal space that helps to define the meanings of two music festivals, while Michelsen charts the figurative spaces created by radio. In the third section, Andean analyses sound in the particular form of electroacoustic music, Benjamin provides a case study in industrial sound and Gorbman reviews some of the changes in the aesthetics and role of film music that have taken place since her pioneering work in the field. We provide more detailed synopses below.

Opening the collection, Yrjö Heinonen analyses the annual declaration of Christmas peace in Turku, a tradition that is said to have continued virtually unbroken since the 1320s, and is still conducted with thousands of locals filling the square for the 15-minute ceremony and most Finns listening to it on radio or TV (for the TV film of the 2013 event, see Joulurauhan julistus 2013 − The Declaration of Christmas Peace 2013). Heinonen explores historical layers traceable in the contemporary form of the ceremony with reference to Raymond Williams’ concept ‘selective tradition’, Jan Assmann’s notion of ‘cultural memory’ and Eric Hobsbawm’s ideas of ‘invented traditions’. Today, three historical layers can be distinguished in the declaration of Christmas peace: the medieval core, the early modern layer and the layer of nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalism. Thus, the ceremony represents the cultural memory of certain crucial periods of the Finnish past. In his analysis, Heinonen shows how, in its contemporary form, it is an invented tradition fabricated to serve nationalist purposes. It is residual in the same sense as, for example, ceremonies of organized religion or monarchy: functioning to maintain cultural memory in and through the sounds, as well as the physical spaces, that frame the ceremony.

In a participant/observer ethnographic study, also drawing on the scholarly literature, Lars Kaijser uses one event, the so-called The Pink Floyd Happening, which was held in Stockholm in May 2011, to explore two of the most debated issues in popular music canon formation and perpetuation: that of authenticity and what Simon Reynolds called ‘retromania’. These discourses frame the assessment of covers, tribute acts and museums, in which as in this case, space negotiates with memory in the discussion of how representations, performances or enactments of the past can be apprehended and interpreted. The event was a re-enactment of a Pink Floyd concert, which the band had played in 1967 at the same venue, and it asserted several claims to authenticity. Kaijser explores how the event simultaneously was characterized by eclecticism and an anachronistic bricolage, where irony and play sometimes were more important than memory and context. The happening addressed a certain time-space in music history and its representation held various authenticities. It was to be identified and recognized through iconic images of clothes, instruments and bodies, but also in sounds and artistry. Kaijser emphasizes that the staging of a historical music event in an entrepreneurial setting such as this does not follow ideas of academic rigour or accurate use of historical sources. Instead, it combines various layers of authenticity that work together at the event – not competing, but complementing each other.

Kaarina Kilpiö discusses how Finnish C-cassette users remember constructing their own musical and social practices in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s through the use of this affordable and low-quality mass listening technology. Her research material consists of Finnish listeners’ recollections of the influence and consequences of C-cassette use for their everyday life and music listening in these decades. Kilpiö shows how C-cassette users found the active pursuit of their personal musical identities and the expansion in soundscape control the most important factors in recalling their relationships with the listening technology. The cassettes offered children and young people an opportunity to express their independence and to defy authority. Equally significant is that the format was embedded in both the social practices of the young and in the family life and domestic routines. Thus, the analysis also offers a wider understanding of the meaning of recorded music for users in everyday situations in late twentieth century.

Paul Long and Jez Collins examine how online practices of musical memory-making have proliferated across social media, in blogs, web pages, forums and Facebook groups. They reflect on the manner in which online communities construct memories in such digital non-spaces albeit in and around references to geographically and temporally specific sites of music culture. Central is an exploration of how music, its experience, form and meaning, is evoked in order to understand its role in memory-making and its display. Informing this exploration is the idea of affect and the capturing of the emotive, material and physical role of music in memory. The practices raise questions about the nature of memory, the music archive, of history and the heritage recorded in such sites. Long and Collins argue that, alongside the collection and sharing of music and of associated artefacts, the archive is manifest in the nature of such collective memories forged in online interactions, which involves an ongoing assessment of the significance of venues, individuals, bands moments and of course – the music itself – as a resource for personal and shared pasts.

The second section begins with Sara Cohen’s report on a recent project exploring the relationship between space, music and autobiographical memory. The emphasis is on memory as a social practice produced through social interaction, grounded in social situations and contexts and informed by social and ideological conventions. This approach draws attention not only to the process of memory-making but also to memory as work, a common way of conceptualizing memory within disciplines such as social anthropology that helps to emphasize the effort of memory-making (recalling, forgetting, inventing, re-inventing, organizing, sharing and so on). The chapter begins by explaining how audiences in England were invited to map and share autobiographical memories of their musical past and moves on to describe how these memories were spatially situated and related to a narrower, more defined sense of place. Reflecting on this process, Cohen considers what it reveals not just about the relationship between music, space and autobiographical memory, but also about the value and significance of music in general.

Jelena Gligorijević asks critical questions about uses of cultural space and memory in connection with Exit festival and the Guča trumpet festival in the historical context of post-Milošević Serbia. Encapsulating the organizers’ and participants’ idealistic aspirations, the festivals in her view become microcosms of nationhood set against the broader background of the Serbian nation state. Taking as her point of departure commentary that emphasizes schematic binaries (as, e.g., ‘East/West’), she argues for more flexible and nuanced modelling incorporating ‘a range of other conflictual arenas as well’, and a ‘more fluid, dynamic pluralistic and outward projected idea of national identification’. Gligorijević thus makes no attempt to oversimplify the complex and overlapping social formations undergirding the festivals’