Experimenting with Sound and Silence: sonorous bodies, sonic selves, acoustic topographies, and auditory histories of schooling

Abstract

This article deconstructs some of the underlying assumptions that inform projects in Paynter and Aston’s 1970 book, Sound and Silence. Foucauldian and Deleuzian technologies of power and technologies of desire are used to frame an argument that Paynter and Aston’s projects play into the fabrication of sonorous bodies and sonic selves but also provide potentialities for the creativity of the subject. Sound and silence as material-in-flux is analysed through notions of temporality and affect to argue for a context of hope in acoustic topographies and auditory histories of schooling.

Keywords:

• Sound
• silence
• temporality
• affect

Notes

¹ John Paynter and Peter Aston, Sound and Silence: Classroom Projects in Creative Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

² Ibid., 12.

³ Ibid., 13.

⁴ Herbert Read, Education Through Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1943).

⁵ Peter Slade, Experience of Spontaneity (London: Longmans, 1968).

⁶ Sybil Marshall, Adventure in Creative Education (London: Pergamon Press, 1968).

⁷ Margaret Langdon, Let the Children Write: An Explanation of Intensive Writing (London: Longmans, 1961).

⁸ See, for example, David Holbrook, Creativity and Popular Culture (London: Associated University Presses, 1994).

⁹ Paynter and Aston, Sound and Silence, 6.

¹⁰ Ibid., 11.

¹¹ I worked for two years in 18 infant, junior, and primary schools (9 schools in year 1 and a different 9 in year 2).

¹² Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 136.

¹³ For Paynter and Aston’s role in the development of music education in England, see John Finney, Music Education in England, 1950–2010: The Child-Centred Progressive Tradition (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

¹⁴ Chambers Dictionary defines “sonic” as relating to or using sound or sound waves. I use sonic to refer to both materials of sound and to ways in which bodies and selves relate to or use sound in their becoming and being.

¹⁵ Chambers Dictionary notes that “acoustic” relates to producing or operated by sound.

¹⁶ Cathy Burke and Ian Grosvenor, “The Hearing School: An Exploration of Sound and Listening in the Modern School,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 3 (2011): 323–40, here 335.

¹⁷ Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), xi.

¹⁸ Chambers Dictionary notes that “auditory” derives from the Latin audire to hear, which underpins meanings of auditory and audible related to processes of hearing. The term “aural” began its history in 1847 meaning “of or pertaining to the organ of hearing” but did not appear in print denoting something “received or perceived by the ear” until 1860. In referring to an “audible past” and to “auditory histories”, I follow Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), in seeking the idea of the aural and of its historical inflection (here in schooling).

¹⁹ See Sterne, Audible Past, 16ff; and Ingold, Being Alive, 137 for how sound has been thought to enter the body through notions of ears as “holes in the skull”, while the visual has been oriented towards a point distanced from the body around notions that leave us to “reconstruct the world inside our heads”.

²⁰ “Ensound” is a term I take from Ingold, Being Alive, 135.

²¹ Paraphrasing Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorise the Political, ed. Joan W. Scott (London: Routledge, 1992), 22–40, here 37.

²² Sterne, Audible Past, 10.

²³ See Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010) for music as idealised instance of sound. At a simplistic level, acoustic horizon refers to the farthest distance in every direction from which sounds may be heard, but this differs according to the “hearer” and by ways in which sound as vibration is “heard”; see discussion below of Sterne and “tricky” definitions of sound.

²⁴ Karen Barad defines intra-actions as “nonarbitrary nondeterministic causal enactments through which matter-in-the-process-of-becoming is iteratively enfolded into its ongoing differential materialisation … iterative intra-actions are the dynamics through which temporality and spatiality are produced and iteratively reconfigured in the materialisation of phenomena and the (re)making of material discursive boundaries and their constitutive exclusion”. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 234.

²⁵ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1963), 55; Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968), 217–52; John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 1934), 8.

²⁶ Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 5.

²⁷ Ibid., 10.

²⁸ J.Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 5.

²⁹ Paynter and Aston, Sound and Silence, 12.

³⁰ Davies, Romantic Anatomies, 6.

³¹ Ibid., 5.

³² Ibid., 7.

³³ Ibid., 10, 45.

³⁴ Sterne, Audible Past, 2, 13.

³⁵ Ibid., 11. Chambers Dictionary describes “anthropocentric” as “having or regarding mankind as the central element of existence”.

³⁶ Sterne, Audible Past, 13.

³⁷ Ibid., 10.

³⁸ Paul Carter, “Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing and Auditory Spaces,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 43–63, here 44.

³⁹ Burke and Grosvenor, “Hearing School,” 338.

⁴⁰ LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, xx.

⁴¹ Burke and Grosvenor, “Hearing School,” 338.

⁴² Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

⁴³ Steven Connor, “The Modern Auditory I,” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 2002), 203–23; Connor, “Sound and the Self,” in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark M. Smith (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 203–23. See also Henri Lefebvre’s perceived, conceived, and lived spaces in The Production of Space (London: Wiley, 1992).

⁴⁴ Ingold, Being Alive, 29, 138.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 137.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 139.

⁴⁷ Maria Tamboukou, In the Fold between Power and Desire: Women Artists’ Narratives (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 84.

⁴⁸ Maria Tamboukou, “Interrogating the ‘Emotional Turn’: Making Connections with Foucault and Deleuze,” European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 6, no. 3 (2003): 209–23.

⁴⁹ Although I deploy the term “ensounding” from Ingold, Being Alive, 135, I recognise that he argues against ideas of embodiment.

⁵⁰ Tamboukou, “Interrogating the ‘Emotional Turn’”.

⁵¹ Paynter and Aston, Sound and Silence, 25.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Ibid., emphasis in the original.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 34.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 35.

⁵⁷ Ibid, 35–36.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 36.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 61, emphasis in the original.

⁶¹ Ibid., 25.

⁶² Ibid., 62, 64.

⁶³ LaBelle, Background Noise, 51.

⁶⁴ R. Murray Schafer, “Soundscapes and Earwitnesses,” in Smith, Hearing History, 3–9.

⁶⁵ Davies, Romantic Anatomies, 5.

⁶⁶ From a different perspective, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 27.

⁶⁷ See Sterne, Audible Past, 16ff.

⁶⁸ LaBelle, Background Noise, 25.

⁶⁹ Ibid., xii.

⁷⁰ Ibid., xi, xii.

⁷¹ Ibid., xii.

⁷² LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, 54.

⁷³ Burke and Grosvenor, “Hearing School,” 338.

⁷⁴ LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, xvii.

⁷⁵ LaBelle, Background Noise, xiv.

⁷⁶ Ibid., xi.

⁷⁷ Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Feminist scholars and scholars of colour have pointed to how conditions of inter-dependence are intersected by webs of power relations operating at multiple levels in ecological approaches. See, for example, Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Wiley, 2013), 212.

⁷⁸ Small, Musicking, 54.

⁷⁹ June Boyce-Tillman, Experiencing Music – Restoring the Spiritual: Music as Well-being (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), 212.

⁸⁰ For noise, sound pollution, and environmental policies see LaBelle, Acoustic Territories.

⁸¹ Paul Hegarty, Noise Music: A History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007), 3.

⁸² Connor, “Modern Auditory I,” 209.

⁸³ Burke and Grosvenor, “Hearing School,” 329.

⁸⁴ Noah W. Sobe, “Concentration and Civilisation: Producing the Attentive Child in the Age of Enlightenment,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 1–2 (2010): 149–60.

⁸⁵ Paynter and Aston, Sound and Silence, 16.

⁸⁶ Schafer, “Soundscapes”.

⁸⁷ See Burke and Grosvenor, “Hearing School,” 329ff. Teachers tended to grapple with this in new ways in 1960s and 1970s England as primary schools increasingly adopted “open-plan” arrangements.

⁸⁸ This article also works within some of the paradoxes that are highlighted in Roland Sintos Coloma, Alexander Means, and Anna Kim, “Palimpsest Histories and Catachrestic Interventions,” in Postcolonial Challenges in Education, ed. Roland Sintos Coloma (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 1–22.

⁸⁹ Paynter and Aston, Sound and Silence, 6.

⁹⁰ Joyce Goodman and Andrea Jacobs, “Musical Literacies in the English Inter-war Secondary-School Classroom,” Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 1–2 (2008): 153–66.

⁹¹ Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 137.

⁹² Ibid., 109.

⁹³ Ibid., 111.

⁹⁴ Antonio Viñao, “History of Education and Cultural History: Possibilities, Problems, Questions,” in Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling, ed. Thomas Popkwitz, Barry Franklin, and Miguel A. Pereyra (London: Routledge, 2013), 125–50, here 135.

⁹⁵ Langer, Feeling and Form, 110.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 112.

⁹⁷ Antonio Nóvoa and Tali Yariv-Mashal, “Comparative Research in Education: A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?,” Comparative Education 39, no. 4 (2003): 423–38, here 433.

⁹⁸ Langer, Feeling and Form, 113.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 114.

¹⁰⁰ Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 228.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 194.

¹⁰² Isomorphism refers to the apparent similarity of form between two entities. For critiques of the step from isomorphism to symbol in Langer’s work see: Ernst Nagel, “Review of Philosophy in a New Key,” Journal of Philosophy XL (1943): 324–27; and Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 335–37, both cited in Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

¹⁰³ Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 243.

¹⁰⁴ Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregg and Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–28, here 1.

¹⁰⁵ Megan Watkins, “Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect,” in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 269–88, here 269.

¹⁰⁶ Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 244.

¹⁰⁷ Ingold, Being Alive, 139.

¹⁰⁸ Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 1.

¹⁰⁹ Michael Hardt, “Foreward: What Affects are Good For,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Tincineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), ix–xii, here xi.

¹¹⁰ Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 6.

¹¹¹ Lawrence Grossberg, “Affect’s Future: Rediscovering the Virtual in the Actual,” in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 309–38, here 313–14.

¹¹² Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. G. Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

¹¹³ Grossberg, “Affect’s Future,” 318.

¹¹⁴ Michael Fielding and Peter Moss, Radical Education and the Common School: A Democratic Alternative (London: Routledge, 2011), 136.

¹¹⁵ Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 14.