Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 2, Issue 2, Autumn 2008, pp (Article)

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1 n F t r f nd t d F t nt th P l f r H nd t v J. rtzl r Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 2, Issue 2, Autumn 2008, pp (Article) P bl h d b L v rp l n v r t Pr For additional information about this article Access provided by Penn State Univ Libraries (18 Feb :20 GMT)

2 MSMI 2:2 Autumn One Future of Sound Studies Fits into the Palm of your Hand STEVE J. WURTZLER The proliferation of PDAs, MP3 players, and cell phones with various added features has already changed our experience of the world, media, mediation, and sound. A mediated version of the world now fits into the palms of our hands. These devices are also potentially the site of crucial questions explored by sound studies and critical theory more generally, questions that overlap and intertwine, impinging upon each other and constituting a conceptual framework that is to my mind both the past and the future of sound studies. As always, the critical theorising of academia can help us to understand the daily lived experience of an increasingly mediated world. It can provide new perspectives and cause us to reflect upon that which might otherwise be taken for granted. We often devote our intellectual labour to what our neighbours and even our students merely encounter unreflectively. What might at first seem trivial for example the sound a handheld device makes when summoning its owner, a.k.a. a ringtone is in fact an increasingly crucial site of people s self-performance of identity and their experience of media. The world of commerce takes notice even if our neighbours and our students do not. Billboard has for some years kept a chart of the week s most downloaded ringtones and a 2006 account describes ringtones as a $600-million industry (Franus 2006). Entertainment companies know a revenue stream when they hear one, and marketers can readily identify another site in which to cultivate that longed-for partnership between consumers and brands. Simple reflection on our increasingly ubiquitous handheld devices draws to mind a series of subjects about which we pose the questions that are in my estimation the basis of sound studies. In this brief space I want to invoke some of the subjects that both drive my current research/writing projects and characterise the past and indeed the future of sound studies.

3 170 2:2 Autumn 08 MSMI Technology Sound studies has, for many of us, hinged on the subject of technology: its history, and its perpetually changing present. Often we cite work on the social construction of technology (SCOT) for the way it reminds us that any technological apparatus is always historically contingent (Pinch and Bijker 1987). Technology is understood not only as a physical object but also as the practices it enables and disables as well as the discursive construction of both objects and practices. Unlike the portable Victrola of the 1920s, the transistor radio, or even the first generation of mobile phones, these new portable devices are not linked to a specific medium. Instead they embody a convergence of media, and a convergence of socially produced categories. They offer both reciprocal voice and data communication, transmitted and recorded sound, still and moving images. They function simultaneously as camera/microphone, storage device, and monitor/speaker. They have the qualities of a sealed black box/pre-programmed device, yet they are also consumer-programmable (within limits). They instantiate both the live and the recorded. They inhabit the realm not of either/or but instead of not only but also. Hailing Sounds, of course, hail us; they call out to us. Hailing can be coercive, seeking to induce in us a particular behaviour, whether instructing us to stand clear of closing subway doors or beckoning us into a retail environment in which the physical design of aisles and displays, further acoustic inducements, and ubiquitous video monitors, will (seek to) pull us ever further into the store. Such hailing can seem individuated directed toward one quality of ourselves, or to our self-construction of identity. Or we can be hailed as a larger group. The voice on the Metro platform in Washington, D.C. addresses me as a security-conscious subway rider in a post-9/11 world. The voice instructs me how to behave if I see someone leave a package behind, speaking to me in the singular, If you see. But that voice also coercively reminds me that safety is now the responsibility of us all, hailing me as part of a security-conscious collective. Again, not either/or, instead not only but also. 1 Today we often collaborate more fully in our own hailing by, for example, selecting the ringtones that will summon us, perhaps even choosing a ringtone based on how it might articulate and publicly announce a self-constructed identity. The last time I checked, there were 1 What I have in mind here is a comparatively minor articulation of the ubiquitous subjectivity that Anahid Kassabian has begun to unravel. See, especially, Kassabian 2001.

4 MSMI 2:2 Autumn obama.com/mobilev2/ accessed 12 June To my mind, the best work on contemporary public soundscapes remains Sterne twelve officially sanctioned Barack Obama ringtones available for download; each version is a strikingly odd mix of music and political rhetoric/soundbite. 2 Our ringtones hail doubly: acoustically pronouncing to those who overhear them, this is who I am, even as they also, when programmed individually, announce to us privately this is who is calling. We also collaborate more passively, mutely accepting each new (often commercial) addition to our soundscape as yet another inevitable contribution to the cacophony that surrounds us. Our ability to ignore some hails (the sound of a car alarm no longer brings my neighbours to their windows), to grow immune to their beckoning, prompts further innovations and additions to the soundscape. Some urban police forces now counteract the proliferation of handheld distractions and drivers apparent indifference to the sounds of sirens by deploying the Rumbler, a new type of siren that emits a sound so low and so powerful that it is experienced bodily as a vibrating sensation (Klein 2007). Urban sound is now more fully tactile. Contemporary hailing often prompts turning away tuning out via our earbuds, and the construction of a personalised, private, mobile soundscape. When experienced through headphones, handheld devices attest to a structural tension between the broadcast programmed music that increasingly fills public and semi-public spaces, 3 and the private, portable, ubiquitous personal soundscapes enabled by the ipod and other MP3 players. This tension, first embodied by the Walkman s confrontation with the boombox, might not actually be a tension at all. The private, mobile soundscape is a rejection of programmed sound even as it is also an embrace of the concept, the physiological experience, of programmed sound. Composing it oneself via the playlist doesn t change the fact that the mobile citizen s mobility is acoustically accompanied. (Branded) Performances of Identity Private, mobile soundscapes reject programmed sound even as they also embrace it, repeating structurally the tension, or indeed the paradox, between personal expression and the consumption of mass-produced commodities that has been crucial to identity formation and our methods of understanding such (slippery) formations. All style, all fashion, exists in this nexus of autonomy and conformity, of consumer choice/ free will and the inertial constraints of tastemakers and commodity culture. This is also the goal of branding: individuation through group consumption. Like fashion understood as the construction and public performance of an identity based on a series of socially coded and socially acceptable

5 172 2:2 Autumn 08 MSMI choices the customisation of handheld devices allows for (a constrained) self-expression. This also creates additional opportunities for branding, for brands to be (re-)articulated via consumers own choices about personalising their devices. What we might initially think of as distinct personal self-expression on the one hand and the identification with a massively marketed brand on the other are in fact linked. Just as identity can be articulated through musical styles (one s membership in a so-called taste public ), so too can the individuated self be articulated through identification with commodities, or more accurately with the qualities embedded within a commodity through branding. Hand in hand with the proliferation of mobile devices, brands have aggressively adopted acoustic signatures. The ipod promises this individuation-through-mass-consumption-ofcommodities. While mass consumption is enacted through downloads of commercially produced music, individuation might be performed through the selection of earphones or an ipod dock, or through the purchase of a protective sleeve, but it is even more vividly enabled through the composition of each playlist. Further categorical imprecision ensues when that playlist also includes a consumer- produced song via GarageBand. Like the Walkman before it, the ipod promises an individuated, partially self-designed experience of the urban soundscape, one that oscillates between individuation and conformity, between producer and consumer, and between auditor and audience. Once we were only accessible through the family radio or TV set. Today it is estimated that every household contains over ten devices capable of generating sound. From computers to PDAs, cell phones to remote controls, gaming consoles to ipods, cameras to electric toothbrushes, the list grows daily. And what will the future bring? Your alarm clock will play you a customized message, telling you in gentle tones that it s time to wake up. You ll walk to the kitchen where your fridge announces that you re running out of milk but more has been ordered for you via the web. You ll leave the house and walk to the subway where billboards will send you personalized audio messages tailored to your buying preferences. Your disposable coffee cup will play a soundtrack selected by Starbucks while you drink. And all this before breakfast! (Lamb 2006) From the sound of it, those of us in sound studies have our work cut out. But that work, to me, involves old questions old paradigms mobilised to address new and emerging technologies and practices even as precisely those technologies and practices undermine media specificity and some of the heuristic binaries that long informed critical work

6 MSMI 2:2 Autumn (collective/individual, consumer/producer, personal expression/mass consumption, individuation/conformity, auditor/audience). In short, the future of sound studies is its past. While I loathe the thought of a coffee cup singing to me, and when my fridge speaks I ll turn a deaf ear toward its cries for help, nonetheless the cacophony and all its commercial nonsense hails me. References Franus, Noel (2006) Three Levels of Audio Identity, Intentional Audio Identity Blog, accessed 11 March 2008 Kassabian, Anahid (2001) UBISUB: Ubiquitous Listening and Networked Subjectivity, Echo: A Music-Centered Journal, 3.2, Fall, available at: Klein, Allison (2007) With New Device, Police Shake, Rattle and Roll, Washington Post, 29 October, p. B1 Lamb, Lisa (2006) Sonic Branding Gets Louder, brandchannel.com, 11 September, accessed 22 February 2008 Pinch, Trevor J., and Wiebe E. Bijker (1987) The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (eds.) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp Sterne, Jonathan (2003) Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space in Rene T. A. Lysloff and Leslie C. Gay, Jr. (eds.) Music and Technoculture, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp