1. Introduction In the present days, we live in a mainly visual society. Due to certain technological developments, we have a logocentric culture. Sonodeconstructuralism proposes to be a reaction against this scenario, changing the focus to sound by reaffirming its power, enhancing its possibilities and defying pre-established assumptions. This essay proposes to reflect on the Studio Practice involving the creation and establishment of Sonodeconstructuralism, analysing its practical implications, inserting it in our society and perceiving how it affects our culture.
1.1.
Sonodeconstructuralism
According to the Oxford dictionary (2015), the suffix –ism means to denote a system, principle, or ideological movement. Which means that, creating an ism relates intrinsically to shaping how people behave. In our Studio Practice project, we had to design an –ism and build a system that would create and spread its ideals and somehow reflect on society. In this context, the -ism that my group designed was Sonodeconstructuralism, an ideological movement that recognizes the power of sound and questions traditional assumptions about sound certainty, identity and possibilities. It intends to change the relation to sound and change relations through sound. It is a “metaidea”, which means that it explores within the –ism itself new ways to interpret its own concept. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica (2015), sound is a mechanical disturbance that propagates through matter and that can be perceived by the human ear. The historian and philoshopher Jonathan Ree states “Sounds are temporary in our world of physicalist and materialist semi-biases. They seem as if they float, move and change. They are the ghosts of ontology in their lack of shape, in their ‘colourless, tasteless, odourless’ intangibility and fragility”. (Ree, 2007, p.19) Although they need matter to exist, sounds are shapeless, untouchable, ephemeral and related to the moment. They present a transitory quality, can be manipulated and spread ideas efficiently, because they travel through space and can reach many people simultaneously. An important point is the difference between sound, noise and music. Usually, when talking about sound, people automatically think about music, although this is not a broad definition. In addition, when talking about noise, we do not really consider it as a sound and definitely not music. Noise is considered an ‘unwanted’ and unorganized sound. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (2015), noise is a sound that lacks agreeable musical quality or is clearly unpleasant. Anything that disturbs people somehow and prevent them from actually hearing what they want is noise. It may be considered as a primitive approach, a sound yet to be refined. For sonodeconstructuralist purposes, noise is a strong tool and it needs to be taken into consideration as much as any other sounds. In contrast, music is a combined sequence of sounds and rhythms that may produce a certain feeling. According to composer and musician Jim Paterson (2015), aspects such as tempo, rhythm, pitch, melody, harmony, patterns and cultural background influence how music is made and how it affects us. Music is an art form that shapes many different cultures, because it is a very human way to express something and can naturally bring different emotions. It relates so
much to culture that usually, a music style can be associated with a place or a time in history and certain cultural manifestations. Based on those concepts, Sonodeconstructuralism proposes to be a dynamic movement that can influence people’s perception, emotion and communication. It intends to reaffirm the power of sound and deconstruct sound by analysing and ‘breaking’ it and, by doing that, challenge its meaning. In addition, use all sorts of sounds as tools to maybe expose and challenge situations. In Sonodeconstructuralism, hearing is a capacity to be appreciated and used wisely. The importance of the other senses is not underrated; it is just a matter of different levels of relevance. All senses coexist for a reason and the combination of them is what makes us humans. However, sound has an invisible force that needs to be reckon with. Light is considered almost an enemy by sonodeconstruturalists. Written below is the Sonodeconstruturalist manifesto:
Figure 1: Sonodeconstruturalist manifesto (2015). Listen at https://soundcloud.com/laramach/manifesto-final
1.2.
Influences from theory and culture
Sonodeconstructuralism relates to the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction Theory (1967). Deconstruction gained many definitions through history and it is open to different interpretations, but for the purpose of this study, it will be considered as a method to understand the creation of something. Deconstruction looks at something and breaks it into smaller parts, questioning its meaning. According to philosophy Professor Leonard Lawlor (2014), it is a theory that never finds itself at the end. We can continue to endlessly deconstruct things, because it is a processual way of thinking.
Also related to Sonodeconstructuralism, Sound Art is a very ‘fluid’ concept that defines a set of practices that involve art manifestations such as sculptures, paintings, media, among other ones, in which sound and listening are the fundamental elements. According to composer and writer Alan Licht (2009), Sound Art is a movement that has no specific time and place or group of artists behind it and its boundaries and definitions are blurred. “It is a movement that is mainly of value in crediting site or object-specific works that are not intended as music per se”. (Licht, 2009, p.9) In figure 2, as an example, an installation by David Tremlett (1972) which showed a set of recorded landscapes sounds as a map of Great Britain.
Figure 2: The Spring Recordings, by David Tremlett (1972)
Another relevant influence is the work of John Cage, a musician, composer and artist that approached sound differently. He used to write his music in a particular way, defying music sheets and using chance to compose his pieces. Cage believed in composition as a process, therefore why he composed in a random way, so the composer’s needs would not be involved in the process.
Figure 3: Example of a John Cage piece (2014).
His most famous composition is 4’33” (1952), which is performed entirely in silence with a pianist sat in front of a piano (Tudor 2006). The intention is to focus on environmental sounds heard by the audience and demonstrate that, according to Cage, anything could be music. Studying how sound acts as tool for social control was also an interesting point for Sonodeconstructuralism. Because people sometimes are not aware of sounds, they are also not aware when they are being controlled by it. We looked at how politicians impose themselves to look trust worthy and convey confidence, although sometimes they lack on those two concepts. For example, in the movie The King’s Speech (2010), the world was instable because of war and the King of Great Britain stammered through his speeches, what made him look like a weak leader. Then he had vocal training to learn how to give comfort and confidence to society on those dark times. A similar example is Margaret Thatcher, whose voice was so distinctive that it became one of her strongest political weapons. According to The Telegraph (2014), at the start of her political career, her voice seemed to “shrill” to inspire people as a leader. Therefore, she also took lessons to help develop her firm and calm tone. Another researched concept is that it is easier to control a crowd with sound and not visual, looking at tools such as megaphones, marches, work songs, fire alarms, organized singing, protests and so on. Moreover, it was also perceived that many sounds control our personal actions in everyday life, such as a bell ringing, the sound produced by a microwave when food is ready, horns to draw attention in traffic and so on. This reveals that sound sometimes helps us to complete tasks of everyday life and assist designs to fulfil its premises. In addition, it shows that our routine is being constantly controlled through sound, conscientious or not.
2. Sonodeconstructuralism within the 21st Century Sonodeconstructuralism is a form of reaction to our current mainly visual society. We tend to underrate sound, because we live in a visual world, especially with the massive use of smartphones and computers. We are centered in words and images, because they may feel more ‘permanent’ than transmitting things orally, which can lead to sound being a mere support perception. An example of massive influence of visuals is the enormous use of texting and appearance of ‘emojis’. They are actual pictures for almost everything (The Guardian, 2015). They aid online conversation, acting as extensions to words. Because they can represent almost anything, they diminish the need to write many words, making online conversation more interactive. On ancient times, humans used to be “oral beings”, which indicates that this behaviour may be a more primitive instinct. For example, in ancient Greece and Rome, stories used to be spoken and passed onto the next generations through a word-spreading process. Nowadays, the visual information gained more interest because it seems less ‘ephemeral’ than sounds, it appears to be more ‘set in stone’. According to Zygmunt Bauman (2000), we live in liquid times, where nothing is permanent, everything is accelerated, and our society is in constant process of adaptation. Based on that idea, it appears to be more coherent to base our modern life on such a shapeless and ‘instant’ thing as sound. Having a society that values sound, perceives it differently and explores ways to
use it would transform sound into this powerful tool to communicate, change meanings and challenge situations. Nowadays, in a design aspect for example, we have many different situations where sound is present (like when pedestrians can cross the street) and where it is not. Sonodeconstructuralism can act inserting deconstruction principles in everyday life situations, questioning why sound is there and if the situations where sound is not present would not work better if it were there. For example, in an emergency like a fire, it would probably be better to also hear the emergency instructions of safety objects, because it is an instant communication and can reach many people at the same time.
3. Practical References From the beginning, we engaged in a practical manner with our ideology (See video “Sonodeconstructuralism Experiments�). Our experimentation can be divided into two categories: breaking paradigms of sound and challenging situations through sound. My group started out trying to build knowledge about sound and its potentialities. We also engaged in experiments related to perception such as changing the expectation of what would something sound like. We also worked on enhancing hearing capacities (by using condenser and headphones) and building sound producing and listening tools (See figures 4, 5 and 6). We changed soundtrack to certain scenes and analysed different languages, breaking words, exploring tong twisters and so on. We also engaged with changing pitch and speed in political speeches in order to test the importance of sound to convey ideas.
Figure 4: Built sound producing and listening tools (2015).
Figure 5: Built listening tool (2015).
Figure 6: Sculpture related to sound transmission (2015).
From those experiments, we could achieve interesting results. We realised that experiments regarding sound perception are related to surprise. People would be intrigued because of broken expectations and they would start being more aware and interested in understanding sound more. For example, enhancing listening capacities made people more engaged in the activity because their perception was altered. Moreover, the change of soundtrack with a specific intention built a different meaning to the scene; it completely changed the environment that was initially built. It was also possible to conclude how much sound affects meanings of messages. For example, when we changed the pitch of Barack Obama’s voice, the message conveyed just did not feel
the same and he sounded a lot less powerful, despite presenting the same strong image. Therefore, the use of sound as a powerful political tool was exposed, because people would realise that the way that politicians portray themselves influence heavily on our belief in their words. After that, my group attempted to engage with a more social and political sphere. We began by reading posters at a board on Goldsmiths corridor and enhancing sounds produced in certain environments (such as waterfall in a bathroom in relation to toilet flush). In addition, we tested “the area” covered by sound by playing an unpleasant alarm sound and verifying what kind of power it needs to reach people, then walked around central London with the alarm and played in a café full of people. We also defied visual spaces, such as The National Gallery by giving sounds to paintings. We could perceive from those experiments that not only people would be surprised, but also they would engage more with their surroundings and change their previous actions. For example, people were not stopping to look at the posters on the board, but then when we placed sound engaging with the passers-by, they would actually stop, be intrigued and receive the message from the poster, much better than visually. Another conclusion that we could perceive is that social behaviour related to sound is very connected to the Nudge Theory (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009). This theory analyses how people behave and argues that is possible to reinforce and indirectly suggest certain actions and that this is more effective than directly giving instructions. Moreover, it affirms that the different ways of thinking may lead people to make mistakes because of preconceived ideas, false notions or other people’s influence. For example, they are likely to continue a course of action, even though sometimes is clearly not a right one, because people are very influenced by the activities of others around them. We can clearly see the influence of that theory in our experiments with groups. For example, they could all hear the same message on the corridor, but when someone stopped to look at the board, more people did stop as well. The biggest example of persisting in an error just because the rest is doing the same is the experiment with playing a strong alarm sound in a café. The alarm was played for approximately three minutes and it was a very loud and unpleasant sound and, although some people did know that it was a specific person playing it, nobody did anything for most of the time. When one person left the room, others started to leave as well. However, no one complained to the person playing the alarm, because no one else did, which was not the best interest for everyone.
4. Conclusion We can conclude that Sonodeconstructuralism has potential to alter profoundly the visual society that we live in. As the experiments showed, sound is a powerful tool to control perceptions and actions and much more effective to reach more people and provoque quicker responses. Moreover, understanding what sound is and how it can be used gives people more control over their choices. By proposing to value sound, we started some small initiatives that, on a bigger scale, could begin altering the focus of society and build a new culture involving sound perception and production. Sonodeconstructuralism proposes deconstruction of sound to reconstruct its relevant meaning in society. Therefore, the re-signification of sound could transcend its previous concepts and limitations and open it to new possibilities.
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Images Figure 1: Machado, L. 2005. Sonodeconstruturalist manifesto. [electronic image] (Personal collection). Figure 2: Tremlett, D. 1972. The Spring Recordings. [photograph] (Tate collection). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/tremlett-the-spring-recordings-t01742. [Accessed 18 December 2015] Figure 3: Dickson, C. 2014. Order_cage_fontana_mix. Available at: http://cdickson1.workflow.arts.ac.uk/part-3-john-cage. [Accessed 18 December 2015]. Figure 4: Sonodeconstruturalists, 2015. Built Sound producing and listening tools. [photograph] (Private collection). Figure 5: Sonodeconstruturalists, 2015. Built listening tool. [photograph] (Private collection). Figure 6: Sonodeconstruturalists, 2015. Sculpture related to sound transmission. [photograph] (Private collection).