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Listening for enemy planes before radar.
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Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, author of the classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, on the difference between sound and noise.
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Socially Networking Misophonia
At a Mexican restaurant. Waiting for my family to get here. Listening to people eat chips with their mouths open. Everywhere. Kill me. Kill me now.
—misophoni-yites on tumblr
For people who experience what has come to be known as “misophonia,” the sound of other people eating can inspire “rage, panic, fear, terror and anger, all mixed together.” This fight-or-flight response can be triggered by other everyday sounds—footesteps, for example—but mouth sounds seem to be the most common complaint. Most of us have never heard of misophonia, but for those who identify with the term, it finally puts a name to a subjectivity that suffuses their everyday lives.
Coined only in 2003, misophonia is poorly understood at present. As with two longer-established auditory conditions I study—tinnitus and hyperacusis—the lines that define it are blurry. What is it? What isn’t it? What causes it? What ameliorates it? Is it even “real”? Misophonia has yet to be constructed as a clear object. A tumblr post such as the one above can be viewed as one person’s effort to help realize it as an affliction. The more real misophonia becomes as an object, the more sympathetically the poster’s actions will be interpreted socially. Better to be a “misophonia sufferer” than “that jerk who won’t ever eat with us.” Moreover, suffering from something that others don’t understand can be lonely and disempowering. Putting a name on this subjectivity and circulating it through social networks opens up possibilities of identity, community, and action.
Could there be a downside to socially networking misophonia, however? In realizing disparate and poorly defined auditory experiences as a singular pathology, do actors strengthen the neurological, conceptual, social, and technological connections that support its experience? In other words, given the plasticity of the brain, words, society, and science, do networks actually remake the world in misophonia’s image rather than merely clarifying the public image of a preexisting affliction? With a phenomenon such as misophonia, which is so subjective as to make the mind-body distinction seem rather absurd, the question seems pertinent.
The point here is not to suggest that misophonia is “just” in people’s heads and therefore not real. Rather, as Annemarie Mol has shown with something as “concrete” as atherosclerosis, a great number of words, techniques, and technologies must be deployed to make symptoms cohere as disease—and this achievement subsequently exerts profound influence on future actions and material conditions. Mol’s ontological approach to disease has the potential to resolve nature-culture debates such as the controversy surrounding the inclusion of “culture-bound” psychiatric syndromes in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is a “both-and” rather than “either-or” approach to disease, treating cultural discourse as one of many types of associations that construct its reality, rather than an overlay that obscures or distorts that reality.
My ongoing ethnographic research into tinnitus (“ringing in the ears”) points to possibilities and potential pitfalls of misophonia’s emerging coherence and circulation as an object. Through networks of research and activism, tinnitus has gained wider recognition, specialized treatments and clinics, a fairly powerful advocacy group, and a loose system of physical and online support groups. However, there is no cure, and many of my clinician interlocutors express concern that their patients’ increased attention to tinnitus is perversely turning up its subjective volume. (Neurologists and audiologists often describe this in terms of strengthening the neural pathways of tinnitus through “checking on it”). We might anticipate, then, that socially networking misophonia may make it more real in social space and more real in subjective headspace. What empowers the sufferer may also empower the condition.
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Sound, Nature, and Artifice
The front-page review of this Sunday’s New York Times book section is dedicated to Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra. As Krause himself pointed out in a recent message to the listserv of the World Listening Project, this is the first book on the soundscape or acoustic ecology to roost in this esteemed literary perch. I haven’t read Krause’s book yet, but I was intrigued by the review, written by the wonderful pianist-blogger Jeremy Denk:
He asserts that in the wild, animals vocalize with a musicianly ear to the full score of the ecosystem — a mix of competition and cooperation. Since animals depend on being heard for various reasons (mating, predation, warning, play), they are forced to seek distinct niches: “Each resident species acquires its own preferred sonic bandwidth — to blend or contrast — much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement.”
An extraordinary claim arises from this “niche hypothesis”: the healthier the habitat, the more “musical” the creatures, the richer and more diverse their scores. Sound complexity is a measure of health.
Based on Denk’s review, Krause’s sometimes “hectoring” tone seems to put him in the mold of fellow musician and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer, the godfather of a genre of nonfiction that demands we listen to what a sonic mess we’ve made of the world. Krause’s close attention to wildlife, however, is also reminiscent of Purdue biologist Bryan Pijanowski’s recent work in soundscape ecology, which focuses not on single species, but on the interplay of animal sounds. (In fact, you can hear Krause and Pijanowski together in 2011 NPR interview.)
Just yesterday I spent the day interviewing two men who spent their professional lives fabricating the sounds of nature for use in Marsona sound machines, used for 40 years by the stressed and sleepless. We discussed the details of simulating crashing waves with an analog circuit, then randomly adding carefully edited digital samples of seagull cries. Krause stresses the fact that humans have lost touch with the natural soundscape through our own architecture and noise. Sound machines such as the Marsona mask both noise and our isolation from nature with samples and simulations of natural sounds.
However, I think it would be far too simplistic to suggest that sound machines only further deafen us to our own noise and estrangement from the shared soundscape. Krause would never have become so finely attuned to natural sounds had he not started recording them for a musical project. The relationships between “nature,” “reproduction,” and “fabrication” are deeply intertwined. It is no accident that acoustic ecologists tend to be musicians and sound artists. These are people who learn to listen deeply while engaged in the sonic arts—such listening is not natural, but a matter of human artifice. Playing with sound, using it as material, whether for art or scientific measurement, is a central aspect of how we define and experience the natural. In other words, the techne that reduced soundscape diversity to something approaching an acoustic monoculture is also our only hope for restoring that diversity.
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The Sound of Ruins: Sigur Rós’ Heima and the Post-Rock Elegy for Place
Lawson Fletcher does a sonic-spatial analysis of post-rock:
Amongst the ways in which it maps out the geographical imagination of place, music plays a unique role in the formation and reformation of spatial memories, connecting to and reviving alternative times and places latent within a particular environment. Post-rock epitomises this: understood as a kind of negative space, the genre acts as an elegy for and symbolic reconstruction of the spatial erasures of late capitalism.
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Listening to Tinnitus: Roles of Media When Hearing Breaks Down
I have a new article on tinnitus up today at Sounding Out, the sound studies blog. It’s a little introduction to my ongoing research on these phantom head noises and the ways people use media devices to treat it and, sometimes, to express their torment. Here’s a little snippet that sums up relationship between tinnitus and media that I’m exploring:
During my fieldwork in audiology clinics and conferences, tinnitus support groups, and online forums, I observed that audio media were being deployed as medicine and technologies of self-care. Gradually, I came to the realization that the experience, discourse, and treatment of tinnitus is always bound up in mediation. In fact, I believe that tinnitus signals the highly mediated nature of our most intimate perceptions of sound and self.
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"Children’s Headphones as Social Media" by Tyler Bickford
In his ethnographic study [PDF] of K-8 kids, Bickford discovers earphones are connectors, not isolators:
Most often two friends would share a pair of earbuds—one for me, one for you—listening together with one ear as they participated in the dense overlap of talk, touch, and gesture that characterized their unmonitored peer interactions. By sharing earbuds kids activated and delineated relationships, and they solidified certain types of social bonds. With the same actions they enforced and regulated status hierarchies, excluding certain children from listening even while expanding access for others who might be limited by parental resources or restrictions. While a complex logic of genre, celebrity, and consumerism informed HCS children’s musical tastes and habits, most prominent was the intimate embedding of earbuds as social anchors among the complex networks and hierarchies of these elementary- and middle-school children.
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What is a sound walk?
Via a great discussion happening on the Sound Studies Google group, this link to sound pioneer Hildegard Westerkamp’s instructions on engaging your acoustic environment.
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BBC Radio 1 - BBC Radio 1's Stories, 808s, 303s and 909s
An hour-long audio doc on how the Roland 808, 303 and 909 changed music.
Author
Mack Hagood
