elconklin

Sound is something often disregarded in today’s time and architecture, but it was one of the main motivations behind specific architecture in many churches and places of worship. Rath, Blesser and Salter all agree on this premise, that spaces in churches were often created specifically for a sound purpose. Both Byrne and Rath give details of the intentions of acoustic spaces crafted with a purpose for a certain sound, whether that be a Quaker meeting room with “no corner for the devil to hide” or Carnegie Hall, built for a specific auditory purpose. Rath diverges and speaks of the “emphasis on noise rather than sound”, meaning that “articulation was not as important as volume” in terms of the congregants of the church. This idea is interesting in its application, and shows the power that sound had and still has in a religious setting. In his TED Talk, Byrne focuses more on the musical elements of the spaces rather than the pure sounds of a space, like Blesser and Salter’s focus on the possibly religious sounds of the stairs at Chichen Izta. The ideas come back together with the speak of reverberations, something all four thinkers think are important — Blesser, Salter and Rath all speak in specifics of amount of time per reverberations in specific buildings, and Byrne discusses the different types of music that were suited for a specific type of music with certain lengths of notes and rhythms. Byrne complements Blesser, Salter and Rath by bringing their fairly religious-centered ideas into a more modern application, where it’s easy to see the impacts of these acoustic places in many types of music. Without a doubt, all of the thinkers cause the reader to think more carefully about the intent of the building that they’re in, as well as the idea that buildings are often more than just buildings.

The deeper implications of sound are often disregarded, brushed over. But beneath the surface of sound, there are deep, painful racial roots. In the introduction to Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s book The Sonic Color Line,  she discusses the issues and tensions between sound and race, and how sounds are often more than just sounds. “These sounds, heard and unheard, have stories. If we listen, we can hear resonances with other times and places: segregation’s hostile soundscapes, the obedient listening that whites expected of slaves, the screams and prayers of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester” (Stoever 3). Just like the sad songs of the slaves in W.E.B. du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Stoever writes about how the sonic color line has resulted in the creation of two vastly different cultural contexts, on both sides of the line, with both sides containing deep feelings within sound. Though time has moved past slavery, the resentment still exists, just now in the confrontations with police officers regarding speeding tickets and the quiet student at her desk. A black person is to be neither too loud or too quiet, or else to upset the white person with a gun. So, how does this society move past this way of treating each other? Is there any way to wipe away the stories of the past of sound and to end this violence based around sound, or are we doomed to this violent sonic color line forever?

The human voice is something that we are constantly surrounded with, yet we never think of it as what it truly is. In the words of Mladen Dolar, the human voice “…functions as the bearer of an utterance, the support of a word, a sentence, a discourse, any kind of linguistic expression” (540). He forces the reader to stop, think, and look at how voice is used in the human sense, as a vessel to carry meaning. Dolar also touches on the individuality of the voice, which relates closely to Cavarero’s idea of the “uniqueness” of the voice. However, Dolar takes this idea of the voice being “like a fingerprint” and applies it to his original thought of voice itself being without meaning and “not linguistically relevant” (545). This is different from Cavarero’s idea of the singing woman and the king, because the singing voice, to Cavarero and the king in the story, has a relevance and joy, “enjoying the sound of the ‘vibration of a throat of flesh'” (521). It’s possible that Dolar finds the voice enjoyable, but in his argument, the voice is nothing more than “the instrument, the vehicle, the medium” to deliver the meaning, and the “jungle” of noise that is nothing more than just that (541). This is different from Cavarero’s argument because to Cavarero, the voice holds uniqueness and that uniqueness is something worth enjoying, something “alive and bodily” (521). It’s possible that the idea of enjoyable voice would just get in the way of Dolar’s argument on voice being linguistically not relevant, but it’s interesting to see how uniqueness can be looked at from two entirely different angles.

The difference between written and spoken word is one that’s remarkable. Written word allows for one’s own interpretation, while spoken is the object of the speaker’s creation. This truly comes to light in Jordan Scott’s blert – when reading the poetry, it’s hard to picture the meaning of the odd combinations of words and sounds. But when you follow along the reading with the recording, it vastly changes the image of the text. More so, it creates the image – what was once a collection of mostly meaningless words is now a picture of sounds, sounds of, as Barthes put it, “the soul swelling or breaking”(506). The written text has a completely different meaning than the performed, since the stutter of the words gives it a completely different feeling and meaning. The stutter of Jordan Scott brings light to Cavarero’s theme of the “uniqueness of the voice” (521). In Scott’s poem “Two Cheeseburgers, French Fries and A Coke“, the performance and sound of the poem is what truly gives it its meaning, because without the stutter, there is no large significance in “cockeye bob, cocnut palm, cock-up, cocksucker, cock and bull, cock block, cockatoo, cock-of-the-walk, cockpit…” (45). The performance shows the tension that lives within the words and within his own hyoid bone, and shows the true voice of what the author intended, his individuality. The poetry combined with the recording shows his stutter in a positive way, in a way that celebrates the individuality of his own voice.

The sound digs in and twists, like a spoon to the freezer-burned ice cream that is your brain. It’s not as noticeable in other situations – maybe the piano was your great grandmother’s and no one has tuned it since it was thrown into the basement, and its tinny keys might hurt your ears, but never as much as the sound of a piano being tuned. Whether your ears are blessed with perfect pitch or not, listening to the pitch wobble slightly above and below the note is enough to turn a quiet afternoon into a throbbing temple. The persistent beating of the finger on the keys along with the turning of the screws turns the once beautiful instrument, my baby, into something I dread to hear.

But it doesn’t stay that way. You thought it was fine before, just slightly below the pitch on your middle C and F sharp keys, but the awful twisting of the knobs and tightening and loosening of the strings has brought an even more beautiful sound into the air. In order to get to the promise land of a perfectly in tune piano, you have to go through the hell of the tuning. It could be a metaphor for life – change is hard, but the other side is clearer and sunnier once you get through the storm. One could say something similar to Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room”, as the piece changes drastically from the start to the beginning. It begins with spoken word, and goes through a transition to what could almost be described as music, the frequencies of the room. It may not be as beautiful as Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 2 No. 9, but the painful transition of underwater-like sounds brings it into a sound not far from music.