Listening to interruptions: sonic dominance and sonic norms

ABSTRACT

Interruption is a simple, recognisable, and affectively charged phenomenon. Interruption also has complex, patterned implications. In the aftermath of ethnographic investigations into music’s uses for violence, this essay seeks general principles according to which interruption does help and harm. An account of sonic normativity results, based on the principle that sound is difficult to escape. While epistemically useful, susceptibility to sound is also a vulnerability that social frames variously exploit – or protect by cultivating resilience. “Sonic interruptivity” – the propensity of sound to interrupt – gives dramatic import to styles of performing, recording, and audiencing, and provides a point of interdisciplinary convergence around which schools of thought from theatre performance praxis, culture critique, music theory, and soundscape ecology possess shared insight. Anticipating crises of interruption with rituals of interruption, performing extremes of immunity to interruption, or dominating discourses, invading niches, and projecting styles through frequent interruption, creative practitioners engage interruption as a widely understood communicative device whose very insensitivity constitutes part of its meaning. If this essay takes a normative stance, it is that students of sound should not neglect sonic interruptivity – from subtle elision to aggressive blare, the very uncouthness of interruption signals the attention it deserves.

KEYWORDS:

• Interruption
• interpellation
• dominance hierarchy
• Johnstone

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The metaphor of interior discourse as “trayne of thought” appears in Leviathan (Hobbes [1651] 1909, 18), as part of a more general theory wherein imagination is energy transduced from the senses, and sensation is energy transduced from other physical bodies – “imagination therefore is nothing but decaying sense” (Hobbes [1651] 1909, 13).

2. Consult Clarke et al. ([1975] 2006) on subcultural rituals counterposing social class. While Henriques treats the ritual of the outdoor concert as liminal – indexed, poetically, to the limen between day and night (2011, 20) – Turner developed the concept of the liminoid (1974) to reserve liminality for rituals transforming personal identity. The admittedly clunky liminal-versus-liminoid distinction is relevant because liminality implies a more persistent effect in forming communities and liquidating prior, outside, stratifications.

3. Guattari, working in the context of group therapy, used the term “transversality” for the opposite of disciplinary compartmentalisation – the “coefficient of transversality” Guattari (1964 2015), 112) is the degree to which a group can loosen its “blinders,” or look outside of what Bourdieu ([1980] 1990), 66) called “illusio,” commitment to the presuppositions of the game at hand.

4. Althusserian ideology critique is known for locating interpellation wherever it looks, leading, perhaps even more than preceding Marxist writing of the Frankfurt School, towards what might be considered a paranoid or at least deeply pessimistic stance. Although Althusser’s influence has waxed and waned, critical musicology from the early 2000s on – influenced by affect theory and responding to U.S. military atrocities – included a turn towards discourse about violent and manipulative sounds (Cloonan and Johnson 2002; S. Cusick 2006) which seem not only to interpellate, but also fragment the interiorities of, subject individuals, through mechanisms which could be widely generalised upon. However, today’s politics of pessimism present challenges, especially since the further rise of conspiracy theory, and since ideas of right-wing accelerationism developed from a variant of culture critique at Warwick University’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit into a vernacular neo-futurist ideology with violent overtones. Now, overly wide (and paradoxically reductive) theories of irresistible or nearly irresistible social control seem fairly clearly irresponsible, leading the present essay to treat interruption as a quotidian and morally ambivalent phenomenon, while avoiding immediate application to a broader critique of political economy beyond norms governing sound.

5. This essay treats Keith Johnstone’s praxis as scientific. This is, notably, a fictive attitude – Johnstone’s conceptualisation of the status transaction does not involve the type of methodical description – much less the positivist rigour – at work in some scientific studies of animal and human dominance hierarchies. Nevertheless, read in a humanities context, Johnstone’s framework offers the benefit of being designed for, and receiving, practical application in artistic performance. Further, while conjecturing somewhat beyond what scientific studies confirm, the principles of the status transaction remain testable, and extant science seems to support and nuance, rather than contradict, Johnstone’s conclusions – which themselves bear some resemblance to the foundational, still-influential qualitative insights of Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe regarding pecking orders (cf. Strauss et al. 2022). From a quantitative perspective the most adventurous claim in this essay may be that of a certain inverse relationship between dominance and epistemic acuity; however, scholars coming from Postcolonial or Feminist Standpoint theory may conversely take as trivial the notion that dominant groups are disproportionately ignorant. This note to say – social dominance finds complexity of expression beyond that explored here.

6. Lalonde (2021) refers to cultural appropriation’s interruption of reference from symbol to culture in terms of “nonrecognition” and “misrecognition.” This sense of misrecognition – as disrupted chain of knowledge – must be distinguished from Bourdieu’s (e.g. Bourdieu ([1980] 1990), 68) and [1970] 2006, 109) notion of misrecognition (méconnaissance) – as docta ignorantia, knowledge’s shadow, learned ignorance that accompanies learned knowledge. However, Lalonde’s and Bourdieu’s senses of misrecognition converge in Spivak’s (1999, 164) notion of “sanctioned ignorance,” the ignorance displayed by dominant authorities towards signs’ origins in subaltern communities. Compare with the relation this essay suggests, in hierarchies of interruption, between dominance, ignorance and insensitivity.

7. Conversely, for a sceptical thread, consider McCartney (2016, 161) and O’Callaghan’s (2018) critiques regarding topoi of naturality and purity in acoustic ecology and music composition.

8. Since at least 1991 some Russian scientists have considered electromagnetic radiation in terms of “electromagnetic ecology” (Kislov and Taranov 1991), a concept analogous to acoustic ecology, and equally applicable to animals and machines susceptible to electromagnetic interference. Compare Goodman’s (2010, 36) cryptic remark: “The episodic history of sonic warfare’s perceptual assemblages can therefore equally be found in electronic and electromagnetic cartography, the distributed nervous system of technical sensors that feed it, and the flood of information these systems produce.” This essay does not further explore the communication hierarchies or legal debates effecting territorialisations of the electromagnetic spectrum, which research might further complicate epistemologies in sound studies by treating electromagnetism in terms developed for what might be called the ecological unsound (cf. Erlmann 2017, 360). Such research will need to investigate the affordances of mechanical versus electromagnetic sensation, sometimes elided where sound scholars study waves beyond the audible.

9. “As has been said a million times, audiences are more willing to forgive image than they are sound, so if you’re deciding to go with a lower-end camera, if you skip good sound the whole thing is going to suffer” (Marine 2015).

10. A closely related analysis thread treats vocal recording in terms of clarity, proximity, and intimacy rather than power. Gonzalez (2018) takes after Levitin (2006, 106) and Baudrillard in referring to “sonic hyperreality,” while Kraugerud (2020) refers to “acousmatic intimacy.” Eilish’s vocals especially can be heard as presenting power and intimacy in a novel convergence. Compare also the vernacular discourse – and genre – around ”ASMR”.

11. Compare Kahn’s (1997, 560) argument that John Cage’s 4ʹ33” “extended the decorum of silencing by extending the silence imposed on the audience to the performer.”

12. Advocated at some conservatories – with Beethoven as patron saint – the bravura practice of silent composition requires comprehensively attaining what Edwin Gordon (2007, 24) calls the 6^th and most advanced stage of audiation, the strict(ly) mental capacity to accurately anticipate rhythmic and tonal patterns.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Simon Fraser University.

Notes on contributors

Matthew Horrigan

Matthew Horrigan (he/they) is a doctoral candidate at Simon Fraser University, living and working on unceded Indigenous territory belonging to the Kwantlen, Wsáneć, Stó:lō, Tsawwassen, Semiahmoo, and Coast Salish peoples. Matt has a background as a music composer and movie craftsperson, and studies audiovisual production cultures.