Personal attempt at summary and further reflections after the Sonic Cultural Heritage conference
Exploring Sonic Cultural Heritage was SOKU’s first international conference. This event allowed us to reach out to international experts and invite them to dive into some of the central questions regarding sonic heritage with us. The presenters were historians, curators, musicologists, soundscape scholars and sound designers all invited to participate with each their expertise. This made the conference truly transdisciplinary and thereby an illustration of the central ambition of SOKU: to combine different disciplines and knowledge areas to think through and develop sound as heritage.
The task we engaged with during this conference was to find productive ways to work with sound as heritage and to understand the ways in which sound recordings, sounding objects and sound technologies can inform us about the past and put us in new relationships with the present and the future. In this interest we looked into the relationships between sound, history and curation. The relationship between history and curation is relatively well-explored at museums. But what does it mean to add sound to the equation? What is the relationship between sound and history?... and between sound and curation? And more precisely: how can we learn to care for our sonic heritage?
Session 1: Producing Sonic Heritage
The first session dived directly into the central area between sound, history and curation, and asked what is and what could be sonic cultural heritage?
Mariana Lopéz gave an insight into the role of sound in UNESCO heritage management. In spite of the excitement within sound studies and related fields about the 2003 UNESCO-convention for intangible heritage, Lopéz’ studies of the items listed as UNESCO world heritage show relatively few mentions of sound and sonic qualities, and within the relatively few mentions music and noise is more prominent than other types of sound. Sound appears a few times as a part/dimension of a site, and as a medium for traditions like singing and dancing to unfold, but rarely as an object of curatorial care itself. She asks if we could do better in disseminating sound as heritage and if – in doing better – we could also pay more attention to the original purpose of the convention: to improve the geographic diversity from previous emphasis on Western/European heritage.
While sound is not yet a prominent feature within classified world heritage, the hybrid understanding of heritage expressed in the 2003 UNESCO-convention on intangible heritage inspires ways of dealing with sound asheritage. The two next speakers Meri Kytö and Heikki Uimonen reported from several ethnographical studies of acoustic environments in Finland and beyond and gave account of some of their methods. They underlined that heritage is not in the recording of sound, but in the knowledge and competences of people living with sound. And they unfolded a method of translatability of sonic experience. Their approach is bottom-up and takes the perspective of the listener. Using interviews, sound preference tests, sound metering and sound recording, workshops, discussions etc. they investigate diverse acoustic epistemologies to uncover what they term “living relationships with living environments”.
The two presentations and the following discussion gave a good insight into the present situation for sound and heritage:
- Sound is rarely documented and preserved in institutional heritage practises as a “thing in itself”, but rather as an aspect of – or an expression of – something else: a site, an environment, a ritual, a communication form, artworks, broadcasts etc.
- Yet sonic epistemologies and ways of knowing the world through sound testify to specific forms of cultural heritage passed on organically in communities, and there are ways to investigate and curate this.
- Giving attention to such practises might enforce diversity in heritage management.
Both presentations use alternative formulations to sonic (cultural) heritage. Acoustic heritage (Kytö & Uimonen), acoustical heritage (Lopéz) or even audible cultural heritage (Kytö & Uimonen) might be equally relevant terms – underlining the contexts more than the sound itself.
Jacob Kreutzfeldt opening the conference
Mariana Lopéz
Mariana Lopéz
Meri Kytö & Heikki Uimonen
Mariana Lopéz, Meri Kytö and Heikki Uimonen
Session 2: Curating Sound: Spaces and Publics
The second session explored the relationships between sound and curation and dived into practises of ‘caring for’ sound: collecting, preserving and exhibiting sonic heritage.
Carsten Seiffarth has as independent curator and producer worked extensively with sound installation art. He has often reinstalled historic sound art pieces such as David Tudors Rainforest, Alvin Luciers Empty Vessels and Rolf Julius’ Musik, weiter entfernt. In his presentation Seiffarth approached what he calls ‘the heritage problem in sound art’. Like much installation art the sound installation work is bound to the time and the place of the installation, and thus difficult to preserve. Reinstallation is a way to work with such heritage but not without complications, since our knowledge about the original installation may be limited and variations in space and technical setup cannot be avoided. Seiffarth pointed to artist’s diagrams as an object to preserve, since it fixes the parameters that are important for the artist and leaves other parameters open to context specific variations.
The other speaker in this panel, Alcina Cortez, works as curator and researcher with particular attention to the perception of exhibited sound. Her presentation focussed on the potential of sound to define and redefine exhibition spaces, emphasising sound’s capacity to construct spaces that are experienced collectively. Her argument unfolded around the distinction between “absolutistic space” and “relativistic space”, the last exemplified by two exhibitions: The Disharmony of Spheres by Foo/Skou and Stranger than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition, and she argues that sound used in the right way may promote engagement and social dynamics in the exhibition space.
Both presenters underlined the centrality of perception in sound-intensive exhibitions. In the moderated discussion that followed we further explored sonic history and the role of memory and preservation. Central take-aways for me were:
- In the two presentations we saw different examples of how to document and disseminate exhibitions: videos, photos, diagrams etc. This illustrated some of the options in documenting sound intensive exhibitions – each option of course being a proximation, not a 1:1 reproduction of the situation.
- These types of documentation only poorly represent the situation experienced in the artwork or exhibition setting – not the least the social dynamics in and around the space, which might be of great importance to the artist and the curator.
- Clearly there is important work to do in developing standards and manuals for documentation and preservation of sound intensive artworks and exhibitions.
- Yet the questions of preserving sound in this context quickly becomes a question of preserving social and perceptual qualities that seems to evade mediation and storage, and as in the case of everyday sounds and listening practises discussed in session 1 we need to think carefully about what type of knowledge to preserve and eventually to present.
Carsten Seiffarth
Carsten Seiffarth
Alcina Cortez
Alcina Cortez
Carsten Seiffarth and Alcina Cortez
Session 3: Historicizing Sound and Listening
The third and final session dealt with histories of sound and listening. Both presenters were historians, who has researched, published and curated histories of sound and listening.
James G. Mansell introduced the concept of ‘acoustemology’ (from Steven Feld), a term combining ‘acoustics’ and ‘epistemology’ to describe the ways in which listeners gain knowledge about the world through sound. The challenge for historians is to “listen with” historical hearing subjects. Not just to “listen to” sounds that existed in a historical past, but to understand what those sounds meant to people at the time. He exemplified how ideas about sound, silence and noise have been embedded in larger networks of ideas and believes often involving class distinctions. For the curator (or ‘public historian’) the challenge is to mediate encounters between present-day listeners and past sounds. Mansell presented a few projects, where he has experimented with such encounters: one being the “Time Loops” at The Science Museum, London, where musicians performed with historical technologies/musical instruments.
Jakob Ingemann Parby also spans between historical research and curation at a cultural history museum, namely The Museum of Copenhagen. Jakob presented his research in the “Sounds of the Capital” - project investigating the sounds of 19th century Copenhagen – a project that resulted in the exhibition “Sounds of Copenhagen”. Parby echoed Mansell in underlining the need to investigate the power structures and aural regimes that formed individual and collective perceptions of the sonic environment. He illustrated from his own research how noise intensified in modern Copenhagen and how the perception of noise was related tofeelings of progress and metropolitanism, but also to anxieties, new sensitivities and new listening techniques.
Like the two preceding sessions this too put emphasis on ways of understanding and interpreting sounding and listening practises. Histories of sound and listening allow us to investigate not only the sound itself, but the sensorial, perceptual, cognitive, experiential, ideological etc. structures and regimes operating in the past and present times.
James G. Mansell
James G. Mansell
Jakob Ingemann Parby
Jakob Ingemann Parby
James G. Mansell and Jakob Ingemann Parby
Next steps?
What could be further discussed and investigated in extension of this conference is how an active practise of collection, cataloguing and preservation could learn from these insights. Below are some initial take-aways:
- It is never enough to document a sound itself. Meticulous metadata is needed to document soundscapes (Kytö).
- Institutional heritage practises should relate actively to non-institutional heritage practises: what do people notice? What do people pass on and protect? What would people want us to keep for the future?
- The classical museum object – preserved and typically mute – is in itself of little value to histories of sound. We need to think about ways in which such objects can be activated and sounded.
- Much knowledge about the cultural history of sound is found in archives: noise complaints, artist diagrams, personal memories, literature etc. Opening such archives to intelligent search practises will facilitate more research on the subject.
Thank you once more to all presenters for their brilliant and thoughtful contributions to the conference. I do hope that this conversation will continue!
Please note that this summary is not representative for the presentations and the discussions that took place in Struer in August. Rather they are my attempt to process and reorder the day and all the wonderful input we received.
Thank you to all those who took part in the Exploring Sonic Cultural Heritage conference!
The program of the Sonic Cultural Heritage conference as well as all the presenters' abstracts can be found here.
