Post #4: Listening Response

In our culture, we often think about “beauty” as being inherently temporal–that anything worth noticing and appreciating is rare and brief, unlikely to be observed again. And yet, it’s easy to forget just how rare and exceptional our experience living on Earth is. This subject is the primary concern of both Westerkamp’s essay “Speaking from Inside the Soundscape” and Watson’s recording El Tren Fantasma. Both artists champion the inherent beauty of the soundworlds of our everyday experiences, whether natural or contrived, and use these spaces as a framework for describing certain universals of the human condition–especially how those universals play out in the course of a lifetime.

In her essay “Speaking from Inside the Soundscape,” Hildegard Westerkamp emphasizes that her role as an artist cannot be described in language that completely removes her from the worlds she creates and in which she participates. It follows that no language has absolute meaning and is dependent entirely on the context in which it was produced. Certain contexts, for example the soundworld inside a mother’s womb, are universal parts of the human experience. As infants in this acoustic landscape, Westerkamp states, “We were, in fact, incapable of stepping outside of it” (2). It is perhaps our common experience in this soundworld that gives rise to the universally understood concept of rhythm–a recreation of the heartbeat and respiratory sounds which would. Similarly the duality of inhalation and exhalation, inflow and outflow, stressed and unstressed, question and answer, which permeates so many musical traditions may have its origins in these shared aural experiences. Even the trope of the three-sound gesture, which I am presently experimenting with in my own electronic compositions, likely derives its meaning from such experiences as the sound of the heartbeat.

Westerkamp proceeds to highlight how all soundworlds inform and in fact cannot be separated from the way we think about and experience the world. This is true also of those soundspaces which are not familiar to all, such as those which emerge from culturally-specific contexts (eg. spoken language, in the more limited sense).

Similarly, Watson’s El Tren Fantasma tells the story of how various soundworlds inform our experiences in different geographic and cultural settings and at different points throughout our lives. The work is characterized by the juxtaposition of natural and industrial soundspaces, in particular the various sounds which one experiences from the inside and the outside of a train. Remarkably, the work seems organized chronologically so as to reflect certain universals about our experiences over the course of a lifetime.

The story begins with a didactic voice, literally telling listeners how to navigate their surroundings. This moment seems analogous to the experience of infants being told how to navigate the world without the context to understand their place in it. After this brief introduction, listeners are left alone to navigate the spaces through which the narrative drives. Most successive tracks alternate between the sounds of wildlife and the sounds of industry in the foreground. Yet, even in the most sublimely soft passages which seem the most removed from society, the dull lull of civilization inexorably cascades in the background, like faraway light pollution punching through a natural setting untouched by man. As such, Watson’s piece highlights how the two sound worlds are both at odds with each other and mutually dependent. 

Through several iterations of this cycle, certain patterns begin to emerge. Well-defined rhythms, for example, increasingly permeate the industrial soundspace and even infiltrate the otherwise “natural” soundspaces. These give the impression of the individual settling into the ambient rhythm of society. Meanwhile, however, sounds more strongly associated with specific tangible experiences, like the train whistle, bleed into a more songlike sound–its heavy articulation lost with the addition of reverb. Such reverb partially fills the void which the heavy emphasis on dry sounds, both in nature and in urban settings, creates. Weary from this dry monotony–which is perhaps analogous to the experience of old age–listeners are given their final reprieve when a voice informs them, “This service has now ceased.”

Beauty, as these artists reveal, surfaces not so much in individual objects of perfection, but rather in the contexts which give meaning to such experiences–the ideologies which do or do not define “perfection.” Those contexts we have the joy and pain of experiencing every second of the ride. We cannot, in fact, separate the experience of beauty from the sounds of the engine that brought us here.