Rhythming: a manifesto

ABSTRACT

Rhythming is a practice of listening otherwise. Rhythming develops perspectives that enrichen how the situations, the actions and the apparatuses that make rhythm in everyday life are understood to matter. Rhythming articulates sonic research that listens and thinks through doing, noticing, and intervening into rhythm. The rhythming manifesto calls for a multi-sensorial, performative, and critical practice of listening and sonic thinking through the following propositions:

1. Rhythming is a practice of listening otherwise

2. Rhythming plays with rhythm machines and tacit habits

3. Rhythming reconfigures the rhythm machine of the future

4. Rhythming cultivates listening as attunement

5. Rhythming activates sonic-material respondings

6. Rhythming reveals listening positionalities

This rhythming manifesto speculates on the principal and particular roles that listening and sensing the sonic have in perceiving the material, physical, technological, and imaginary entanglements of situated experience, as well as their distinct qualities for communicating relations. In this way, the manifesto contributes to an ecology of affinitive relationships, which currently drives eco-political and decolonial movements. There is a current need to be able to identify our systems, and to grow from our practices and analyses new languages, concepts, and modes for understanding interspecies and transcultural relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• sound
• rhythm
• listening
• agency
• sensory practices
• affect
• anthropology

Notes

1. This manifesto emerged from the inter- and transdisciplinary workshop “On Rhythming: sensory acts and performative modes of sonic thinking” that Melissa Van Drie and Carla J. Maier co-convened at the University of Copenhagen in February 2019. We would like to thank all participants for their rich contributions.

2. During the course of two years, we elaborated the beginnings of an experimental research programme based on research and theory in action thanks to our respective Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships at the University of Copenhagen (European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme): Carla J. Maier’s project Travelling Sounds (No 750199) and Melissa Van Drie’s Sounds Delicious project (No 753565).

3. Conceptions and practices around rhythm were also further developed and probed in the Master seminar: “How we rhythm worlds: concepts, representations, practices” at the Arts and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Copenhagen in 2020.

4. As a compliment, see Alain Corbin’s Village Bells (1998): a canonical cultural history on the sonic rhythming of time and auditory ordering of everyday life in different French villages.

5. Simon Schaffer underlines such long occidental historical connections through showing the actual technical artefacts at work in the fascinating BBC FOUR documentary “Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams” (2013).

6. The Ear Phonautograph (1874) of Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J. Blake literally excised a human tympanic membrane, attached a stylus onto the flesh and grafted it onto a wooden and metal base. Following the movements of the membrane, the stylus visually rendered traces corresponding to different sounds. Such experiments on the fleshy ear were key for defining technical capabilities to register and reproduce sound.

7. Etienne Jules Marey’s graphic method that used inscription machines to measure infinitely smaller intervals and variances of time-keeping brought attention to the human senses’ weaknesses. See Marey, La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine (Paris, 1878).

8. During “The Museum of Rhythm” exhibition held at the Museum Sztuki in Łódz (2017) visitors moved around such 19th century rhythm machines. The exhibition’s prodigious catalogue assembles new essays and source texts, outlining how the elaboration of techniques to perceive rhythm was one characteristic of human control over nature so key to modernity, and how this continues to be a topic of interest explored by artists (see Ginwala and Muzyczuk 2017).

9. Melissa Van Drie has done re-enactment performances of phonograph recording and play-back sessions, that illustrate such background sounds and human interventions with artist and scholar Aleks Kolkowski, see Van Drie (20192019, “Refaçonner”) and Kolkowski’s to read: and Kolkowski’s website: http://www.phonographies.org/about/aleks-kolkowski/. On the history of artists who work with noises and glitches of sonic media, see Calib Kelly, Cracked Media (2009) and Melle Kromhout, The Logic of Filtering (2021).

10. See the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies edited by Pinch and Bijsterveld (2011) that recalls techniques of listening to machines in STS. Stories of interruption and breakdown also emerge in histories of learning sensory skills. On the case of medical auscultation and misleading stethoscope machinery, see Van Drie (2013, 176–177).

11. This citation is take from a letter of von Helmholtz written in August 1850. It is quoted according to Leo Koenigsberger (1902, 124); cited in Schmidgen (2013, 169).

12. Riches also builds automata and mechanical voice apparatuses. See Riches’ website repertory: http://martinriches.de/.

13. Weheliye refers here to W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

14. In their introduction to Performing memory in art and popular culture, cultural studies scholars Liedtke Plate and Anneke Smelik “seek to understand memory as an embodied and localised practice. Such a move is part and parcel of a broader paradigm shift in cultural memory studies, from a linguistic to a performative turn. The difference is not only one of focus, shifting attention from the memory trace to its act – the event of memory, its happening. It also implies an epistemological, even ontological shift, from memory as the trace of what once was to memory as the pasts’s present moment” (Plate and Smelik 2013, 5–6).

15. This understanding of listening stands in contrast to commonly acknowledged ideas of static, passive and receptive postures of musical listening. These postures of musical listening are often associated with 19th century Western musical reception traditions and performance apparatuses (concert halls, etc.) (Ouzounian and Lappin 2014, 306).

16. This also resonates with composer Pauline Oliveros’ sound practice of deep listening, in which listening oscillates between meditation and intervention (Oliveros 2005).

17. Hearing, Jonathan Sterne remarks, implies “a medium for sound, a body with ears to hear, a frame of mind to do the same, and a dynamic relation between hearer and heard that allows for the possibility of mutual effects” (2015, 65). This theatre experience dramatically revealed the possibility of mutual effect.

18. In her Norton Lecture entitled “The Forest” at Harvard University (Spring 2021), performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson underlined the importance of being attentive of the “withness” of the body in any experience of sound. In uttering the word “withness”, Anderson played with the word, referencing Alfred Whitehead’s comment that the body is a starting point for our knowledge of the world, and pointing out the aurally-related word “witness” that is also an important part of the act of listening.

19. The Pure Food Cooking Workshop was conceived by food entrepreneurs Charlotte Ranert and Sanne Ohlander, with Michelin chef Titti Qvarnström. It happened in the Nyrup Forest in Sweden on 10 September 2018: https://www.facebook.com/purefoodcamp/.

20. This corresponds to sensory anthropologist Sarah Pink’s argument in the 2000s for the inclusion of situational experience in academic thinking: an “emplaced ethnography that attends to the question of experience by accounting for the relationships between bodies, minds, and the materiality and sensoriality of the environment” (Pink 2013, 28). In “The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies,” David Howes (2013) traces the sensory turn in which anthropologists’ attuned “much more acutely to how they could use their own bodies and senses as means of ethnographic analysis, and then write about their experience.” See also Tsing and Ebron, “Writing and Rhythm” (2015).

21. We enter now into the terrain of multispecies anthropology. See: Anna Tsing (2015); see also Eben S. Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich (2010).

22. Following the issuance of the primary swarm, a surplus of queens are raised by the workers. The queen that first emerges from her cell announces her presence by tooting and also by release of pheromones (see Winston 1987). Mature queens still confined within their queen cells answer the tooting with a distinct piping sound, the so-called “quacking.” When several confined queens are present in the nest, a chorus of synchronised quacking follows each tooting (see Michelsen et al. 1986).

23. The story of these queen bee sounds and the field recordings can be heard at Melissa Van Drie (2019, “Queens Piping”).

24. The exhibition was commissioned for the C40 World Mayors summit and Culture Night in Copenhagen (11 October 2019). The exhibition was co-created between Melissa Van Drie (sound studies and theatre scholar), Oliver Maxwell (founder of Bybi Urban Honey Project) and Mia Fryk (scenographer and architect).

25. On pleasure encounters between flowers and bees see Hastek and Myers (2012).

Additional information

Funding

This text was created as part of the projects Travelling Sounds and Sounds Delicious and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant [agreements No 750199 and No 753565].

Notes on contributors

Melissa Van Drie

Melissa Van Drie is a researcher, writer, and performer. She works across the disciplines of theatre, music, and the history of science and technology to write cultural histories of sound and listening. She recently completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc fellowship at the University of Copenhagen. Currently, her “Sounds Delicious Project” explores the role of sounding and hearing in everyday cooking, and what a sonic perspective reveals about the human and non-human relationships that make up food. Selected publications: “The Food” (Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound 2020); with A. Harris, “The stethoscope goes digital: Learning through attention, distraction and distortion” (Gesnerus 2020); Hearing through the Théâtrophone: Sonically Constructed Spaces and Embodied Listening in Late 19th Century French Theatre” (Sound Effects, 2015).

Carla J. Maier

Carla J. Maier is a Cultural Studies and Sound Studies scholar and publishes on modes of listening and sound practices in electronic dance music, sound art, skateboarding, urban space & around public monuments. She is author of the monograph Transcultural Sound Practices: British Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transformation (2020). She recently completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc fellowship at the University of Copenhagen and the Sound Studies Lab with the research project Travelling Sounds: A Cultural Analysis of Sonic Artefacts in Postcolonial Europe (2018–2020). She is a member of the research laboratories Critical Europeanization Studies and Migration at Humboldt University Berlin.