The Case for an Instagram of Sound

via Wikimedia Commons

A brief catalog of sounds that I appreciate hearing more than technologized civilization’s ever thickening din:

First, the sound that smoothed sandstone rock flakes, released down a hill by footsteps, make as they slide down across more sandstone talus, or especially, down the red-orange-black of an unbroken sandstone hill, skipping and bouncing and falling into pieces. Every step creates a warm sound of broken pottery; the sounds of rock cascading on rock, sometimes layering over themselves, works as some awesome, fucked-up geological delay effect. Also in this category is the sound of a waterfall from underwater and the wet fwump! of wet snow falling from a roof or tree. See also: the crack of a branch in a quiet, blackforest or even a whole succession of branch cracklings as something big and unseen moves through.

Train sounds are their own species of orchestra—technologized civilization’s thickest din. The horns of dirty, brutal locomotives reverberating around the valley. Also, the small train sounds: the wiiiiisp of air pressure blowing off, the random assortment of creaks a train makes as it begins to move, the weird, digitally reproduced, clipped bell sound of an Amtrak train arriving or leaving the station. All of these are great. Brakes are even a subgenre of excellent sounds, the terrifying shriek concert of a full-train brake, the dull moan of slowing to a stop, the various hissing that comes with brake systems gaining or releasing air pressure.

I think about sound as a photographer. I’m not a “good photographer” but I do it enough that when I’m out in the world I see things in terms of what I would like to see again or that I would like someone else to see from a particular perspective. That’s my guiding principle with pictures. I wonder why exactly we have such a different relationship with sound as compared to how we relate to images. We have music, of course, but that’s not like photography at all. Music is the brush of a paint on canvas or a sculpture or graceful curve of an atrium. But music is not photographs of sounds.

Occasionally a band like The Books will come out with a popular found-sound philosophy, but that’s pretty rare. Pop music nowadays can barely handle human voices, let alone other sounds that just exist as they are. The human voice is neat because it’s a found sound and an instrument. It’s the only thing that’s like that. It’s a fact that actually makes a lot of people uncomfortable. The voice can mean things–can signify things—much further than anything else one might choose to listen to. The voice could signify this thing that you’re reading if read aloud; but also a voice signifies itself, or its source (the sounds of James Earl Jones), and even an acoustical space (echo-o-o). If a voice sang this thing that you’re reading, well, that would be weird.

I take pictures more than I make recordings, but sometimes I do record things while just walking around. The other night walking out along the dark edge of a lumber mill, I heard this …

… and it occurred to me that I had really nothing to do with the recording now that I have it—no place to share it. I found this group on Soundcloud, Sound Art, that advertises itself as interested in ambient recordings, but in practice it looks more like another place for people to post their sick jams. What I want is a place to hear things that people record in the spaces around them. This seems reasonable to me: An app with just one button to record and another to share. I’d have fewer “friends” than on Instagram, in the realm of sound, but there would surely be some. And some who use the app would be pushed to find better and more interesting sounds, and to appreciate those sounds in new and different ways.

We prefer to see and we have fantastic eyes.

It’s worth discussing why this audio-sharing network would be so much smaller than the visual ones and why there would be less interest. For starters, vision is the dominant sense. All I really need to prove this is to ask which sense you would rather lose, but it’s still important to look a bit closer than that. Research has shown that up to 85 percent of our perception, learning, and cognition is mediated through vision.

Just think of absolutely anything you enjoy: “running,” “cake,” “tree,” or “dog.” If you’re an average person, you saw those things in your imagination. (Possible exceptions, like “sex,” are an interesting digression, however.) In psychology, the dominance of vision over the other senses is called visual capture. A popular demonstration of this is the ventriloquist’s dummy illusion. We have an honest sense (ears) hearing where the voice-sound is coming from (the ventriloquist’s mouth), yet we have sight dominating our experience and so we look at the dummy’s mouth and thanks to visual capture, we imagine the sound to be coming from there and not the real origin, the ventriloquist’s mouth.

Visual capture is more extreme than even that. A 2005 set of experiments found that we, as average humans, hear what we see. That is, when we see a thing, that information is encoded as auditory information in an “automatic, obligatory”  fashion. When our ears receive information that is contradictory to that vision-based encoding, it’s disruptive to our perception. We see this—metaphorically—in what’s known as the McGurk effect, which is defined simply as: if we are presented with the auditory component of one sound paired with the visual component of a different sound, we experience a third, less accurate sound.

A 2013 paper in Perception and its Modalities (philosophy spoiler) suggests the dominance of vision has to do with its ability to interpret space in a “uniquely rich” and, crucially, more efficient way than other senses. Imagine walking into a room you’ve never experienced that is loaded with poison tipped spikes and tripwires. You will need a maximum amount of information about the room-space to survive the room. You can get a lot of information about the room via touch or hearing, but you won’t get it as quickly or as richly as you would if you were just looking at it. We can get very, very good at using other senses to do things like navigate fictional deadly rooms, but given a choice, it’s no contest.

Again excluding music which is still a not a good sensory analog for still images, we can see why the brain might be more receptive to a photo than a sound. We’re visual creatures. That’s not the only way it has to be on Earth—my dog is much more of an olfactory creature—but that’s what we’re starting with in this discussion. We prefer to see and we have fantastic eyes.

Ambience is interested in a subject AND all of the junk around that subject equally

That’s not nearly enough, however, for our discussion. It’s easy to be convinced of sight as the dominant sense, but it’s not sufficient to explain the inferiority of found sound as an art (or thing we do on the internet). There are couple of other things worth discussing that come along with visual capture. One of them is the realization that most photography has a subject—very often a human person or single object. A photo is of something because vision is good enough for us to look at a thing or person and say that we have captured it visually. It’s much more specious to say that we have captured the sound of a person or thing as a whole package. We’ve instead captured one particular sound aspect of a person or thing.

That means something way different than saying that we’ve captured an image of a person or thing, where, since the beginning of photography, we’ve been after the totality of that person or thing. There’s that business about photos stealing the subject’s soul and while that’s mostly racist garbage, there seems to be at least some evidence of cultures fostering the belief that a being in a photo could make the subject ill or kill them.

Photography is mostly about a thing that can be placed in the dead middle of a frame, with the rest of the frame supporting that central thing. In other words, it usually has a subject. But the other night when I recorded that bit above, capturing my subject was really only possible with an audio recording. It was very dark and whatever the hell was making that sound quit it as I walked closer. It was definitely not about to give up an image of itself. What comes after that recording ends is just my footsteps and in the distance some mill machinery. (I realize that it doesn’t help my case that I started the recorder for the sake of the bird, a subject.)

What’s interesting is how those things (steps, machinery, bird) add to a place, or an ambience of a place. Ambience is a realm where the visual and the auditory match up pretty well in terms of ability to represent. It’s here that sound might even be able to beat out sight. This is because ambience is interested in a subject AND all of the junk around that subject equally. In other words, it’s interested in everything—and everything doesn’t have a subject. Put another way, there’s no primacy in “everything,” however that actually works out in reality. It’s a stew.

On Instagram people share subjects. In my experience, they don’t share very much ambience. There is very little to be found in the sense of a place on photo sharing sites. Rarely do I get a chance to “like” a photo of a room or some field. This is a shame. I’d like to be better able to share environments and ambience in general. We’ve reached a particular point in evolution and technological advancement that we don’t need to dote on vision anymore to survive or at least not as much as we used to. We have a vision-based internet and given that the internet itself doesn’t exist as an actual space, in the sense of needing to be spatially navigated, perhaps sound just needs a better advocate than websites that autoplay horrible music.

We have the ability to live in a much more rich environment than we do. Think about it like this: As neuroscientist Seth Horowitz points out in his book The Universal Sense, hearing is more than sounds as we typically think of them. Our ears are capable of perceiving—in the best way of all of your senses—a less hyped constituent part of everything in the world. Existence never goes silent; it is always vibrating. Everything has a frequency all of the time. In some sense (heh), that’s where hearing and vision come together, as arbiters of frequency or at least a certain range of it.

I have something like two dozen different filters available on Instagram to manipulate the colors of my pictures in interesting ways, yet I have none to interpret or share Brian Eno’s “vertical color” of sound. On my walk, I recorded the bird first but all of this other stuff around me too. I don’t think I could come up with a place with just a photograph of the bird or section of road or corner of the lumber mill. With sounds, it’s different. You can create or imagine a place inward from the walls rather than outward from the subject, and sometimes this is something from what it’s possible to feel a place more deeply or at least differently.

Eno said this and it works pretty well for what I’m trying to say here: “A lot of things like Music For Airports came out of that Borgesian idea that you could invent a world in reverse, by inventing the artefacts that ought to be in it first: you think of what kind of music would be in that world, then you make the music and the world forms itself around the music.” A photo just hands you the world you’re supposed to see; sound allows you to create it.

So: a sharing network for sounds. Someone build that. I’ll be your first member.

@everydayelk