Earth Sound, Earth Signal (ESES) is a phenomenal book. This is meant in two ways. First, it reorients sound studies by attending to phenomena that have been marginalized within the discussion – the glitches and glissandi deemed ‘noise ’by a history that has largely been written from the perspective of audio technologies intended for sonic reproduction and high fidelity auditory experience. In taking up earth’s sounds and signals, it rewrites existing tendencies and assumptions about technology, nature, and culture, and their respective boundaries, undoing binaries and commonly held meanings. And by the end it makes it all seem obvious: that radio is nature, that bodies are technological, and that the noise of technology might be musical. The book begins with the statement that ‘radio was heard before it was invented’ (1). Just as earth sounds and signals are existing phenomena that telephonic technologies brought into the realm of human perception, the book makes us aware of things encountered but not formulated, leaving us with a resounding feeling of the inevitability of it all. This is achieved through an impressive scale of research that brings together wide-ranging fields of inquiry, stitched together with a deft analysis that treats the material – physical, energetic, auditory, aesthetic – as historically situated.
ESES is also phenomenal in its attention to the physicality of energy. ‘The challenge of this book,’ Kahn writes, ‘is to think energy’ (9). In ESES, energy is a continuum in which sound is one form. Through transduction, a process of transforming one kind of energy into another, electromagnetic and physical energies are made audible. Thus, in ESES, sound is neither reified nor objectified but is rather relational, a force among others. Kahn uses the term ‘aelectrosonic’ to describe sounds – physical energy – transduced from electromagnetic energies. This enables an engagement with sounds heard as well as their energetic sources, affording a proximity to ‘a materiality often assumed to be immaterial’ (17). That the physicality of sound as energy is one of motion and force puts pressure on the objectifying tendencies of strains of sound studies that take as their basis recorded sound as well as recent discussions of materiality (Bennett, Harman, Morton). The latter are striking in their omission of energy as a force or mobility, of the physicality of the atmospheric, and of differential qualities of matter. Kahn’s formulation of sound brings energy and atmosphere into a discussion of materiality, necessarily revealing qualities of material forms, whether durable or seemingly immaterial. Always perceived in, through, and across space, sound is conditioned by air, ground, tree, and wall, ‘complicated because elements – the propagated energy, paths of propagation, media and matter, objects and bodies, ambiences and environments – continually exchange with one another’ (171). As Joyce Hinterding’s work with conductive metals emphasizes, sound is ‘a means to interrogate the materiality of objects (242). In ESES, thus, objects – and atmosphere – are ‘collaborative’, facilitating or disallowing sound to be conducted and imparting their qualities to that which is heard.
In emphasizing transmission rather than transcription, physics rather than engineering, Kahn follows the movement of energy through and across technologies. In this way, ESES achieves what Kahn asks of Friedrich Kittler. Rather than focusing on the technologies as such, the book follows ‘the potential flows’ which ‘lead through the power outlet on the wall to green media and a politics of energy, and to a global architecture of ubiquitous media founded on transmission’ (23). Facilitated and made audible by a series of technologies, this ‘moving materialism of energyʼ’ (17) is always lived and perceived. Kahn’s attention to the phenomenon of energy, whether electromagnetic or physical, is organized around perception – the moment of becoming audible to the human ear, and human engagements with energy sounds. As Kahn puts it, he is concerned with ‘lived electromagnetism’ (17). Yet even as the human ear is in many ways the organizing principal for the discussion, this ear is an element in assemblages of human–energy–matter. For the ear, as Kahn explains, is a transducer that contributes its own acoustical vibrations to shape the sound heard and recognized by humans. As such, sound as we know it is always transduced, always transformed from one modality of energy to another, whether in-kind or in-degree (55). At the same time, the ear perceives (in) space – perception is always transperception, whether on the scale of the body, a room, or the earth (192). Scale that is produced by audible energy: from human brainwaves to hemispheric whistlers, the global transmission of seismic waves and atomic blasts to lunar echoes.
Implicit throughout ESES is a deeply ecological project. Earthquakes heard halfway around the world in the late nineteenth century and early radio that crossed the Atlantic meant the ‘whole earth’ was sensed long before the idea was given shape as part of an explicit environmentalist outlook facilitated by the visualization of earth from space (17). This is an ecology of the anthropocene: an ecological awareness (of humans) made possible by technology, made sensible through audio and visual media of transduction, that in the end is only that – lesser, always, than the expansiveness of the universe. As Kahn writes of Semiconductor’s Brilliant Noise and Black Rain, the static and glitches in the pieces ‘reinstate the presence of human observation through exposing technology’s contingency and frailty, especially when confronting such a grand scale of natural forces’ (198). At the same time, technologies have the capacity to overwhelm life itself, whether through nuclear annihilation or climate change, both of which recur as concerns throughout the book. ESES ends with carbon, an ‘elemental crossroads of objects and energies’ (249), the driver of modern life and the principal contributor to climate change. Hinterding’s The Oscillators are inscribed energy, using graphite to ‘draw and to draw energy’ (251)’ Used here as a medium for audio inscription, carbon brings us back to the book’s opening; though Kahn states that ESES is about telephony, not recorded sound, it turns out it is about both. Carbon, thus, draws together inscription and transcription, ecology and climate.
Kahn describes the structure of the book as ‘episodic’. Driven by an effort to make sense of works by Alvin Lucier and Hinterding, which serve as bookends to the art works discussed, ESES precedes each of these works – along with compositions by John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and Thomas Ashcraft engaging hemispheric sounds, Robert Barry’s installations of radio frequencies, and numerous other works by artists and composers such as Katie Paterson, Paul DeMarinis, Christina Kubisch, and Peter Blamey – with chapters outlining the scientific and technological developments underpinning them and making them possible. Looping back onto itself and moving forward through new iterations of earth sound and signal, the book takes the form of intertwined spirals that allow the reader to dwell in the material and ideas by returning to them even while opening into new domains. By including Thomas Watson’s aesthetic interest in the crackles heard over the telephone wire as an ‘episode’, Kahn undoes the emphasis on ‘the artsʼ suggested by the title. Like Lucier’s string quartet Navigations for Strings, which uses pitches from a satellite transmission for a composition that ultimately moves into the sound of ‘atmos’ (114), in ESES boundaries between technology, art, and society are both made and blurred. By initiating discussion of the book’s thematic concerns with technological and scientific developments that made natural radio audible, ESES equally provides an account of the material conditions of possibility for contemporary composition and a history of mutual influence across engineering and music as it addresses ‘energies and earth magnitude in the arts’.
Kahn is a writer–composer of twentieth-century avant-garde composition. Like the works and artistic movements it takes up, the book itself blurs boundaries – between art forms, between nature/culture/technology, between materiality/immateriality. Grounded at least in part in personal relationships – whether of student, teacher, or friend – ESES exudes an aura of collegiality between author and artists that is also a form of transduction, with sound and composition becoming text. Presenting the compositions through text and image emphasizes the multidisciplinary nature of the works themselves, even as the emphasis on accounts of live performances, and of pieces in which bodies (whether of artist or audience) affect the work, underscores the importance of the phenomenal, of experience. Ultimately, ESES conveys the potential in reading sound, offering listening training that newly attunes readers to transduced sounds of energy in everyday life.
Notes on contributor
Marina Peterson is Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University, Athens, OH, United States. She is the author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles (2010) and co-editor of Global Downtowns (with Gary McDonogh, 2012), both from University of Pennsylvania Press. Her work has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, Space and Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Urban Anthropology.
School of Interdisciplinary Arts, Ohio University, Athens, OH, United States
[email protected]
© 2016 Marina Peterson
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079980