Walking With Sound Cultivating Sonic Attentiveness in the Anthropocene

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Cultivating Sonic Attentiveness in the Anthropocene

Walking with Sound

Sjoerd Bartlema 10461205 M.A. Thesis

Supervisor: Dr Niall Martin Second reader: Dr Tim Yaczo M.A Comparative Cultural Analysis

Faculty of Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank, first and foremost, my supervisor Niall Martin for his great supervision. It sure is strange to finish a thesis without any personal contact after the Covid-19 outbreak settled in. However, Niall has been very supportive and encouraging in the duration of my thesis prosses. Not only the insightful suggestions- and swift replies on my work in progress, but also the many emails with interesting links related to my topic made for the most personal supervision possible during quarantine. I owe much of my insights to him. Secondly, I want to thank my sister, Meike, who has helped me so much by proof-reading my chapters – even when her own deadlines were around the corner. At times when I was not sure if I had articulated my argument properly, your enthusiastic approval meant the world to me.

I want to thank my parents, Evert and Claire, for giving me shelter during the Covid-19 outbreak and offering me a desk to write on (this perhaps sounds sadder than I intend it to be). And, of course, for being supportive all the way through. Also, I would like to express my gratitude towards Maxime, for being there for me and cooking the most delicious meals after a day of writing.

Thank you, Grace, for editing my thesis so thoroughly. Your funny remarks along the way made for much-needed comic relief as I approached my deadline. And my friend Tjobo, for your beautiful illustration. I am a great admirer of your work and therefore beyond honoured that you captured my thesis in an illustration.

Lastly, I want to show my appreciation for the bench I looked out on from the desk at my parent’s. I don’t know what it is, but you always seem to attract people. Whenever I looked up, someone was enjoying your presence and this, for whatever reason, made me feel very grounded throughout my thesis process.

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Introduction

When thinking of representations of climate change, our thoughts usually drift towards visual images. Photographs of discarded, colourful plastic on the beach or polar bears standing on melting ice caps. Perhaps even dry visualized data that shows an increase in environmental pollution. It is less common to think of sound as a sufficiently powerful indicator for understanding climate change. However, when, in 1962, Rachel Carson sought to dramatize the profound impact of human activity on the environment, her chosen representation was sonic.

The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. (Carson 1962: 10)

In this passage, and throughout Silent Spring, it is the disruption of sound that most powerfully conveys the radical character of the pressure humans put on the environment: “There was not a sound of the song of a bird. It was eerie, terrifying” (ibid.:60). Andrew Whitehouse notes the importance of the ‘silence’ analogy that Carlson makes. Despite birdsong not featuring to a great extent in her work, Whitehouse believes that it was unnecessary. For, “she was pointing to something so fundamental and familiar that the meaning of its loss would be both shocking and immediately understood” (Whitehouse 2015: 54).

In this thesis I would like to explore why Carson instinctively turns to the sonic as an index of climate change. I aim to further examine how the relationship between human beings and the environment is mediated through sound. Navigating through the concept of the Anthropocene - the overall hypothesis suggesting that humans have become a driving force behind planetary change – I will consider the environment’s relationship to the sonic. Additionally, I want to question to what extent sound can work towards a de-anthropocentriziation of our environment. To this end, I will analyze three different sound installations, or, ‘soundwalks’, that seem to actively invite us to think and re-think our sonic embeddedness within the world. The question guiding my analysis is, ‘How are soundwalks

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capable of transcending normative dichotomies through sound whilst hopefully leading to a more adaptive and less toxic relationship with our environment?’

My chosen three installations also foreground the connection between sound and movement through space in terms of walking. Consequently, a supplemental concern in this thesis is the ways in which walking is entangled with the sonic and the Anthropocene. As Rebecca Solnit reminds us in Wanderlust (2001), the act of walking is capable of mediating between bodies and their surroundings in harmonious ways. “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord” (Solnit 2001: 5). The practice of walking thus aligns bodies to their environment. It is also due to this quality that I see the potential sound walks bear within. To further explore the relation of walking to the sonic, I turn to Michel de Certeau and his metaphor of the city dweller. For De Certeau, walking in the city is an acting out of place. De Certeau hints toward a resemblance between the practice of walking and that of language; for walking is also a creative practice where you can improvise, make new connections, take several short cuts and make multiple decisions at once in the present (Certeau 1984: 97). The practices of active listening and walking both invoke an altered state of relationship between the body and the environment and, in doing so, enable us to practice and experiment with new forms of living within our environment. Alongside these approaches, I take into account the Covid-19 virus itself as an active participant and speaking partner in this research. Since I find myself amidst the Covid-19 pandemic during the process of writing my thesis, it is an inescapable influence on my concepts and objects. I believe that by inviting the Virus as an active participant alongside this thesis, I further grounds my analysis in the current world.

So, what do the practices of listening and walking have to offer in the Anthropocene, and how does this differ from visual engagements with our surroundings? By engaging with three different soundwalks, I want to explore different forms of relationships to our surroundings. The first object I will engage with is my own soundwalk, Amsterdam CS-Dam, made during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this soundwalk I have sonically engaged with a route throughout the city that echoes the presence of the virus in Amsterdam. By focusing on both listening and walking, in this chapter I will try to gain insights in ways to cultivate attention within one’s environment in the Anthropocene. Accordingly, I will also focus on the practices of soundscapes and soundwalks. For my second chapter I will analyse Electrical Walks by the German artist Christine Kubisch. I will explore the concepts of noise and that of the Anthropocene in relation to her work. Through this work, I try to highlight the potential that

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the concept of noise holds in relation to that of the Anthropocene and vice versa. Building upon the established notion of noise gained throughout the chapter, I will argue that we can approach Covid-19 as having noisy characteristics – or perhaps it could even be seen as a form of noise itself. Finally, I will explore Aquarian Gardens, a guided meditation created by Annika Kappner that invites the listener to explore the (bio)diversity and complexity of The New

Garden; the gardens of Het Nieuwe Institute, Rotterdam. I will analyse this work in relation to

the practices of cultivating awareness, ecology and the mesh. In this third chapter I will focus on new forms of ecologies and ethics emerging within the Anthropocene. In this final chapter, I will further destabilize the concepts of Nature and the environment. It is through the concept of the mesh, that I will bring together several concepts from my previous two chapters and further work through a post-human reading of the Human subject.

In the following part of this introduction, I will firstly situate my argument within the ongoing debate around the Anthropocene, and further connect these topics through sound. I would like to continue to develop a better understanding of why it is important for us to consider the Anthropocene through sound. In doing so, I aim to gain a better understanding of how different sonic experiences provide opportunities for a broader public to explore the world through sound in a way that has previously been inaccessible. How could these ongoing transformations work towards the displacement of the Human subject? From there on, I will build upon Amanda Boetzeken’s notion of affordances in relation to (visual) arts in the Anthropocene, and further develop an understanding of the possibilities that the sonic dimension yields by taking into account the concept of affordances.

Before turning to the relation of the sonic to the Anthropocene, it is first necessary to define the Anthropocene itself. The first to introduce the notion of the Anthropocene as a new scientific meta-narrative was Nobel Prize winner Paul J. Crutzen. In a small article of respectively one page long. It opens as follows:

For the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human- dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene – the warm period of the 10-12 millennia. (Crutzen 2002: 23)

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Crutzen’s opening argument succinctly captures the central debate and key ideas of the Anthropocene. It allows us to recognize what is at stake in the Anthropocene debate and the role the Human subject plays within it. Besides, as Gerard Delanty and Aurea Mota suggest, the Anthropocene has also “opened up new avenues of inquiry that, since the growing acceptance of post-positivist science, for the first time, bring the natural sciences and the human and social sciences closer.” (Delanty & Mota 2017: 10). Consequently, the notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents; it can be seen as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A subsequent meta-narrative that splits across disciplines and allows for thinking and rethinking the Human subject.

It is precisely this thinking and re-thinking of the Human subject that I find most interesting about the Anthropocene debate. Andreas Weber argues that, “the emergence of the Anthropocene idea is a necessary step in leaving behind the old Enlightenment thinking of man versus nature. But it is only a step and must be developed further to a full new view of nature as a generating force inside of us” (Weber 2013: 69). Within the Anthropocene thesis, the Human subject can thus be seen as a subject in transformation; a subject in flux. It places the Human subject in a schizophrenic position, whilst slowly steering it into new forms of being. In this sense, the Anthropocene also becomes a concept drenched in uncertainty and angst.

Further, as Andrew Whitehouse points out, the distinction between the human and non-human sphere is no longer applicable for the concept of ‘pristine’ nature itself is becoming less convincing (Whitehouse 2015: 54). This is also something Timothy Morton stresses, arguing that, “our continued survival, and therefore the survival of the planet we’re now dominating beyond all doubt, depends on our thinking past Nature” (Morton 2010: 5). This again leads to a schizophrenic relationship to our surroundings; the preferred background for the modern Human subject to mirror itself against is now slowly dissolving (ibid.:30). Whitehouse is thus right to remind us that, “the Anthropocene at once draws humans and non-humans together and separates them out. The “end of nature” provokes anxiety both about what has been lost and how it has been caused. (Whitehouse 2015: 54). The concept of the Anthropocene consequently opens up an ambiguous approach that leaves space open for both reflection, imagination and cultivation driven by several forms of anxiety. Through these anxieties, it makes room for new forms of relating to - and reshaping of - the Human subject. In the words of Whitehouse:

The Anthropocene’s usefulness as a concept lies in its ambiguities, which emphasise the anxieties and possibilities that might be imagined in human-driven global systems, and in

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its power to signal both the interconnectedness of human and non-human lives and the potential for their destruction and silencing. (Whitehouse 2015: 54)

In line with Whitehouse, my interest in the concept of the Anthropocene lies in its ambiguities and the role that sound can fulfil regarding these ambiguities.

As such, we should first consider what it means to think, feel and experience our environment through sound. I will further tackle this in my first chapter. But for now, let’s briefly consider the differences between ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ our environment - and the properties intrinsic to both senses. As the scientific focus is gradually shifting from a predominately visual approach in our experience of the world, Don Ihde argues that, “the intrusion of sound perhaps reveals something about our previous way of thinking, a thinking that was a viewing, a worldview. We have discovered a latent, presupposed, and dominant visualism to our understanding of experience” (Ihde 2007: 6). Turning to the sonic realm thus opens up to new possible ways of experiencing and understanding the world. For instance, it has been argued that vision often indicates a distanced perception of our environment that is more static than the appearance of sound. Jean Luc Nancy further depicts these differences between the visual and the sonic in

Listening (2007). According to Nancy:

Listening takes place at the same time as the sonorous event, an arrangement that is clearly distinct from that of vision (for which, incidentally, there is no visual or luminous “event” either, in an entirely identical meaning of the word: visual presence is already there, available, before I see it, whereas the sonorous presence arrives- it entails an attack. (Nancy 2007: 14)

Through our eyes, the brain often makes sense of the world by observing it with a perspective

on or of something. In other words, vision presumes a binary opposition between a subject that

actively perceives other objects; distanced objects (Sterne 2012: 9). In doing so, it functions as a mechanism that mostly separates and distances every ‘thing’ involved in our environment. Sound, in contrast, can be thought of more as a collage; an assemblage tying its surroundings together in an immersive manner (Nancy 2007: 16).

According to Karolina Doughty and Maja Lagerqvist, sound is comprehensive, omnipresent, non-directional, mobile and, “exists distinct from both its source and the subject that apprehends it” (Doughty & Lagerqvist 2016: 60). It thus relocates and connects several

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bodies through a continuous multiplicity. For them, “sound has a capacity to disintegrate distance and reconfigure space in ways that the other senses do not do as readily” (ibid.:60). Focusing on sound thus opens up to new forms of relating to different spaces and the bodies that partake in it. It exists in temporality and within this temporality it is able to merge bodies together within a soundscape existing in the here and now. Strict demarcations between bodies are often derived from an ocular-centric focus of being within an environment - creating a relation to the environment mostly through visual metaphors. Rather, focusing on the sonic environment actively contests these demarcations as it is grounded in perception of environments through the inter-relatedness and a temporality of all bodies within. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it; “the visual is tendentially mimetic, and the sonorous tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing or contagion)” (Nancy 2007: 10). These immersive qualities draws bodies together instead of separating them, making room for new forms of thinking and reshaping the Human subject in relation to its surroundings; an approach that dissolves both.

In order to create a better understanding of our environment, Comstrock and Hocks encourage increased attention to sound in the fields of rhetoric and composition. For, according to them, it is through these fields that we can examine the dynamics of a broader shift in our understanding and placement within our environment (Comstrock & Hocks 2016: 166). Sound opens up to the possibility of transcending normative dichotomies and creating new subjectivities. In doing so, Comstrock and Hocks envision a critical sonic rhetoric that, “upsets dreams of human supremacy or even annihilation and celebrates contingency, enveloping humans in a complex soundscape of relations, birth, and decay” (ibid.:174). Soundwalks create a setting wherein subject and surrounding merge into one; where the dichotomy between human and non-human is able to blur. It reminds us of fixed ways of relating to noise and our surroundings. Comstrock and Hocks suggest that “if we understand the nonhuman Other as sensitive like we are, our perspective, and thus our use of the environment, may become more adaptive and less toxic” (ibid.: 173). In this sense, with its extrinsic focus on sound and the relation it bears with its environment, soundwalks can be read as an exercise in new ways of relating to the world.

The importance of creating attentiveness is central to Amanda Boetzkes’ ideas of art regarding the Anthropocene. According to Boetzkes, art which reflects on this thesis, aims to create an awareness ecology as, “it emerges in and through the existential net of affordance, the coexistent facts of environment and facts of behavior that constitute perception” (Boetzkes 2015: 280). It is mostly the shift of perceptions towards the environment that ties in with the

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notion of affordance which Boetzkes further develops. Boetzkes suggests that, “affordance is a primary relation between a perceiver and the environment that describes the limits and possibilities of both, as these become visible in the moment of perception” (ibid.: 274). It is thus a malleable relation between a perceiver and an infinite amount of so to say ‘unlock-able’ information ‘hidden’ within an environment. It is both relational and invariant in constituting what is actually perceived - or revealed. It is through attentive artworks of the Anthropocene, Boetzkes argues, that people can redefine their embeddedness within their environment by opening up to it in new ways. Nonetheless, Boetzkes focuses solely on the relation between environment and the visual. She thus seems to ignore a full range of sonic dimensions. “What kind of eye, then, does art of the Anthropocene cultivate?” (ibid.: 278), she proposes. “What about the ears?”, I would like to respond.

Sean Taylor and Mikael Fernström also suggest that auditory engagement with both space and place, “is the result of a reciprocal process between a listener and the sonic environment. Information pickup in the environment suggests distinctions and relations that allow the listener to select, organize and transform the meaning of what is heard” (ibid.:4). If we encounter this reciprocal process through Boetzkes’ notion of affordances, we can gradually work towards the understanding of how soundwalks can help broaden our sonic embeddedness through active interaction between the Human subject and the sonic environment – perhaps even dissolving their distinction. Partaking in a soundwalk thus creates a context in which affordances can be both understood and cultivated; both broadened and deepened. Besides, it again opens up to the question of reconfiguring the Human subject. Again: how can we think de-anthropocentriziation through sound within the concept of the Anthropocene? However, as I will argue in this thesis, the distinction between a perceiving subject and an environment merely functions as a form of analysis, for I wish to further overcome the distinction throughout this thesis. Accordingly, when I talk about a ‘listener’ or ‘an environment’, I want to stress that these terms functions as such. It is from these perspectives and interests that I wish to fully analyse and understand the soundwalks I will partake in during the length of my thesis (and beyond, possibly). For the next chapter, I will further engage with both the practice and theory of sound/walking and will use this as a building block to further engage, experience and investigate the city of Amsterdam and the Covid-19 virus.

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Chapter 1. Listening to Amsterdam, Listening to Covid-19

How do we listen to the city, and what lessons can the sonic environment teach us about living in extraordinary times? At the time of writing, quarantining during the corona virus crisis is my being-in-the world and has reduced my space of living – as for most. During the first weeks of quarantine, it could be said that spring was setting in to be far from silent. I was cynically prepared to believe that hearing so many birds in my courtyard was an illusion. However, a news item on the Dutch broadcasting channel NOS assured me that the Dutch bird spotting federation had received more phone calls than ever. Is this the result of the Covid-19 virus? Does our sonic engagement with our environment increase as the city experiences noise reduction, whilst simultaneously our walls slowly close in? In the words of sound expert Chris Watson; “with flights grounded and roads clear, the coronavirus outbreak is the perfect chance for people to listen more carefully to the world around them and re-engage with nature”.1_{Is the}

Covid-19 virus teaching us how to listen again?

Though my courtyard is sonically flourishing during the pandemic, I wondered what the rest of the city sounded like. In order to understand Amsterdam’s sonic environment during the Covid-19 - and perhaps even the sound of the virus itself - I proceeded to record the city. By engaging with practice, I aim to understand the environment of the city both in sound and in walking. Due to some technical difficulties (yes, I may have once failed to press the record button properly. And yes, one of my SD cards turned out to be defective – beginners’ luck, I guess), only my latest walk, Amsterdam CS-Dam (5th_{May), is included}2_{. The process and the}

result of engaging with the city through walking and recording, both serve as my object for this

chapter.

To gain a better insight into the medium of soundwalking, I will first shift my attention towards the practices of walking, soundscaping, soundwalking and listening. Next, I will introduce the flâneur figure, as well as several pioneers in the theorisation of those practices. Recording opens up new ways to experience the environment, and I will use both sound and walking as qualitative research methods through which I encounter and understand the world. To achieve this, I will engage with the practice of listening through a phenomenological perspective. Departing from Don Idhe’s Listening and Voice, Phenomenologies of Sound

1_{inews.co.uk/news/environment/coronavirus-lockdown-wildlife-expert-bird-songs-environment-nature-2535268}_{visited on 15/04/2020} 2_{soundcloud.com/sjrdbartlema/amsterdam-cs-dam-05052020/s-BUnbnypQnmX}_{visited on 06/05/2020}

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(2007), I will gradually incorporate Jean-luc Nancy’s phenomenology as proposed in Listening (1973). Through putting theory in a dialogue with practice, my object consists of both the preparation and understanding of exploring soundwalking, and how to engage with the city in listening and in walking. Hence instead of starting this chapter with a close reading of an object, as in my following chapters, I will weave the object throughout this chapter.

It is important to note my position as a young, able-bodied white manwho grew up in Amsterdam. My sonorous perception of the world is undoubtedly conditioned by my gender, race, class and upbringing in an urban environment. These factors influence the way in which I participate in the sonic environmentbecause I will tend to foreground sounds that, for other people are considered normal. Conversely, I may subconsciously shift particular sounds into the background, as for me they don’t demand much attention. This places myself in a subjective, entangled relationship with my sonic surroundings. I hope to invite listeners to see this as just one possible manifestation of many, many subjective entanglements that make up our sonic environment.

1.1 Taking your turtle for a walk; the practice of walking

Again, I ask myself: “What does soundwalking have to offer in the Anthropocene?” According to Andrea Polli, “sound walking and soundscape composition can serve as both a philosophical and political practice, and these interdisciplinary practices can create alternative pathways for increasing environmental knowing from a personal, environmental and political perspective” (Polli 2012: 259). This emphasis on increasing environmental knowing—or cultivating affordances, as Boetzkes calls it—is what makes soundwalking such a fruitful practice for understanding the metanarrative that is the Anthropocene. To bring its potential in this regard more clearly into view, I will begin by considering the practice of walking by way of reference to the figure of the flâneur.

As a form of exploring and engaging with the world, walking spans multiple disciplines. For many, walking can constitute a, “creative, reflexive, and sometimes subversive, act” (Paguette & McCartney 2011: 136). These qualities are perhaps most vividly embodied in the

flâneur, a well-known literary figure. According to Rebecca Solnit, there is no one universally

satisfactory description of the flâneur. Across its numerous incarnations, a figure emerges that stands somewhere between “a primeval slacker” and “a silent poet”. “One thing remains

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constant,” however: “the image of an observant and solitary man strolling about Paris.” (Solnit 2001: 198). The French poet Charles Baudelaire describes the flâneur in the following manner:

The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s and the water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the tong, in the ebb and flow, the bustle the fleeting and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel home anywhere. (Baudelaire in Solnit 2001: 199)

In light of this passage, the flâneur can be seen as an ambiguous, disruptive figure, who tries to blend in with the crowd and detach themselves simultaneously.

The flâneur was introduced into scholarly discourse by Walter Benjamin, who, drawing on Baudelaire’s writings, presented the figure as an archetype for the modern subject. Benjamin never gave a literal description of the flâneur, but ascribed certain qualities to the figure such as ‘alienation’, ‘detachment’ and ‘observation’ (ibid.:199). These qualities make for an interesting use of the figure, as walking can now also be approached as a disruptive practice. Walking across the city without any purpose other than walk creates a parallel mode of being that makes way for reflecting. It is detachment from an everyday mode of being. This apparent detachment, however, is not to be understood as a detachment from that of the landscape and the flâneur themselves. Benjamin reminds us that it would be impossible to extract oneself from one’s environment. (Paquette & McCartney 2011: 136). The characteristics of detachment and alienation ascribed to the flâneur are more likely to be understood as a form of resistance to a ‘mainstream’ idea of purposeful activity, rather than an actual displacement within the environment. The flâneur alienates themselves from thoughtless, everyday life and turns the practice of walking into a thoughtful event. Walking in general, according to Solnit, has in itself always been an act of resistance after the industrial revolution, as it, “stood out when its pace was out of keeping with time” (Solnit 2001: 267). It became a consciously chosen form of mobility.

By placing the practice of walking within the context of the Anthropocence, there is an active resistance against the vehicles that dominate our sense of mobility in this era. As the scales have tipped towards travel, cars, trains and airplanes have cloaked our interactions with the environment. Indeed, the world is no longer limited to the scale of our bodies, but, as Solnit observers to, “that of our machines and many need – or think they need – the machines to navigate that space quickly enough.” (ibid.: 258). Walking, then, offers a radical break from

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these forms of modern mobility and offers a more attentive navigation of both space and time. The flâneur figure can be useful within the concept of the Anthropocene, insofar as it can help us negotiate the damaging, and toxic relations of everyday life. I will turn to the flâneur, as a detached walker that paradoxically, by detaching themselves, ultimately becomes more entangled with their environment. The very act of walking in the Anthropocene, is an act that reclaims the body in relation to its environment as it allows a stepping back and retuning of oneself. I am aware that the flâneur has a rather ‘male’ focused, ableist approach, but I wish to include the possibility of reading this figure through different approaches3_{. Around the year of}

1840, according to Benjamin, it was fashionable for the flâneur to take a turtle along for the walk, so that the turtle was able to set the pace (ibid.: 200). In approaching the practice of soundwalking, let us consider sound to be our turtle as we proceed to walk outside. In order to do this, I will continue by examining the qualities of sound and soundscapes.

1.2 Getting to know your turtle; from soundscape to soundwalk

The term ‘soundscape’ derives from the Word Soundscape Project and was originally coined by its leader R. Murray Schafer. In The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of

the World (1977), Schafer offers ways to analyse the sounds that make up sonic environments.

For Schafer, a soundscape is to be understood as a parallel to a ‘landscape’. It is thus a sonification of an environment. Yet Schafer stresses, “it is less easy to formulate an exact impression of a soundscape than of a landscape” (Schafer 1977: 7), therefore hinting towards a

different approach in both seeing and listening to our environment. As for Schafer, a soundscape could be considered as events heard, instead of objects that are seen (ibid.: 8). This implies that the sonic environment could best understood as an ‘event’ happening in space and time, while the visual realm is more focussed on different objects within a specific scope. In order to interrogate a soundscape, Schafer argues it should be divided into three different components; keynotes, signals and soundmarks (ibid.: 53). Keynotes are considered ‘natural’ sounds that make up a certain background hum of a specific area. It should be mentioned, however, that keynote sounds are “noticed when they change, and when they disappear altogether, they may even be remembered with affection” (ibid.:60). Keynotes can be explained as sounds that are ‘taken for granted’, while unconsciously they make up a big part of an environments’ sonic palette. In this sense, a keynote mostly affects people’s behaviour through the subconscious 3_{For example through a feminist reading of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting, A London Adventure (1967). Also, when I focus on the}

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level that it interacts with (ibid.10). Sound signals, in turn, are defined as sounds that carry information and are often perceived towards the foreground and listened to more consciously (ibid.10). These sounds are thus associated with a more directional form of listening. Finally, soundmarks, understood as a parallel to landmarks, define the elements of a soundscape that identifies a certain place in time. According to Schafer, it is mostly soundmarks that, “make the acoustic life of the community unique.” (ibid.:10).

When analysing the sounds – or absence of sounds – from the soundwalk I conducted in Amsterdam’s city centre, the alternation of traffic sounds was particularly striking. Traffic is still a part of the city’s soundscape, but in a less prominent way. Thinking of these sounds also helps us understand how Schafer’s demarcations can be read as different sounds able to flow into components asone engages with their environment differently. Let me elaborate on this thought: The soundwalk I have included in this chapter begins at the north side of the Central station where, we hear a ferry waiting to sail. The water splashes while the motor is slowly idling; people board the ferry and you can hear someone ticking on the boat with a ring or set of keys; then the siren of the ferry sounds as it departs. The siren here could be considered a sound mark of this particular side of Amsterdam. At the same time, because I can also hear the siren as I am traveling, it can function as a sound signal, signalling me to hurry. By focussing on listening, this particular instance reveals how sounds shape according to how one interacts with the city and vice versa. The same applies to different sounds in traffic, such as bikes for example. The streets, during the Covid-19 pandemic, are left for new interpretations and sonic entanglement and interpretations that the alternate soundscape arise in. The absence of certain sounds makes possible a reinterpretation of the city centre in that it helps us to imagine new ways in which the soundscape of the city centre could also sound if we engage with it in different manners. These three different components – keynote, signals and soundmarks – thus make for a useful tool to analyse a soundscape and understand different kind of sounds that emerge from them and how they can alter through different relational understandings.

In addition to these components, Schafer has separated two different forms of soundscapes placed in a hierarchical relation to each other. According to Schafer, soundscapes can either be ‘hi-fi’ or ‘lo-fi’. The former would normally be a rural soundscape, whilst the latter would have urban characteristics. “The quiet ambiance of the hi-fi soundscape allows the listener to hear farther into the distance just as the countryside exercises long-range viewing.”, while ‘lofi-sound’, that of the city, “abbreviates this facility for distant hearing (and seeing) marking one of the more important changes in the history of perception” (ibid. 43). This view, as I will argue later on, rests on a romanticized image of the rural environment and a fixed belief

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in something as ‘pristine’ nature. The sonic soundscape of Amsterdam, in Schafer’s view, would be considered lofi-sounds.However, I will not fully follow Schafer’s approach here as it devalues the urban sonic environment that is rich and omnipresent with sonic expressions of the city itself. Moreover, it would create a distinction between the human and the other-than-human forms, as well as a strong reliance on the Geontologies that renders the Life/Non-Life distinction that I will further discuss in the next chapter. This ontological approach is also found in the work of Bernie Krause, a soundscape ecologist and theorist heavily inspired by Schafer’s approach to soundscapes. However, both works remains useful in order to gain better insight in what constitutes the parameters of a soundscape.

In The Great Animal Orchestra (2012), Krause argues that places have developed their own sonic environments. Within these entangled soundscapes, all sounds tend to blend in harmoniously and seem to complement one another instead of disrupting each other. For Krause, this creates, “the tuning of the great animal orchestra” (Krause 2012: 10). Different species occupy different frequencies and ranges and, in doing so, are able to coexist in harmony with other sounds that occur in these places. These sounds can be from other species, or environmental factors such as wind or rain. Krause’s divides the sonic environment into three complementary fields: Geophony, Biophony and Anthrophony. Geophony is sound made up by the physical environment such as running water, wind or rain. Biophony consists of sounds that are made by organisms such as animals, plants or insects. Anthrophony, as the name already suggests, makes up for sounds (indirectly) generated by humans, such as traffic, machines or church bell chimes (Krause et al. 2011: 3). For Krause, Geophony forms the beginning of all other sonic expressions, suggesting that, “the sounds of geophony were the first sounds on Earth—and this element of the soundscape is the context in which animal voices, and even important aspects of human sonic culture, emerged (Krause 2012: 39). All other organisms that followed had to attune their sonic expressions in a specific bandwidth in order to accommodate that of the Geophony. Andrew Whitehouse classifies these distinctions between different sounds as different epochs and so aligns the Anthropocene with a new form of Anthrophony that could be considered a more disruptive type of human-induced sounds than those of the pre-industrial era (Whitehouse 2015: 57). This suggest that the Anthropocene brings with it relatively new formed soundscapes, ‘distorted’ by a new form of Anthrophony.

An attentive approach to soundscapes helps to translate the sounds that make up the Anthropocene. In my soundwalk, however, I have focussed on the possibility of Anthrophony being in tune with the other forms of phony ranges. This focus is in line with Whitehouse’s critique of Krause’s romanisation of ‘natural’ soundscapes. For, in the words of Whitehouse,

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Krause argues that, “the world as it should [sound] is not just pre-Anthropocene, like the rural idyll Carson draws on, but pre-human. It is a world not of companions but of strangers” (Whitehouse 2007 :58). Krause denounces the Anthrophony’s right to exist in a certain sense, and, in doing so, ultimately creates an approach that separates humans from the environment. The reality is that we have to understand our world as a – currently – human-centred world. Instead of a pre-human world, I am suggesting that engaging with sound through both theory and practice helps us mediate a post-human world; it offers tools to work towards de-anthropocentrisation. Indeed, as Whitehouse mentions, the, “emphasis on sound […] emerging relationally and across species boundaries can be aligned with the recent proliferation of “more-than-human” approaches in the social sciences” (Whitehouse 2015: 58). The emphasis on sound can thus help us go beyond these demarcations as proposed by Krause. And, in the context of the ‘lo-fi’ urban environment, this also means trying to further deconstruct ‘nature’ through sound.

Similarly, as Sophie Arkette argues, “to claim that natural sound can be sharply delineated from urban man-made sounds raises the question of what exactly constitutes a purely natural sound, and why are these natural sounds given a privileged status denied to urban sounds” (Arkette 2004: 162). Exploring the city through sound helps us to further disrupt this tension. If we reconsider the increased sonic focus that Covid-19 apparently establishes, then soundscaping allows us to analyse how the virus alters the Human subject and the sound of the Anthropocene. In fact, it is not so much an absence or return of ‘nature’ as such. More likely, it is the fact that the sonic environment has re-tuned itself. Sounds that have always been there, are perhaps more likely to be heard because several forms of Anthrophony have largely decreased during the pandemic. However, if we take Krause’s approach for the mere purpose of analysing these slight alternations in the soundscape, we can sense the following: In the city, the balance between Geophony, Biophony and Anthrophony has subtly altered. The subtle altering of the soundscape should not primarily be described as a decrease of Anthrophony, but rather an increase of Biophony through the presence of the Covid-19 virus. By altering the sonic environment, the virus is also able to expresses itself sonically. In doing so, the virus helps us to listen to the city in a new manner. It might even offer us a glimpse into a slightly more balanced relationship with our sonic environment that moves beyond human-centred subjectivities in light of the Anthropocene narrative. To further engage with this narrative through a sonic environment, we should bring in the practice of soundwalking as it leads towards a more disruptive practice altogether.

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The practice of soundwalking gradually evolved from the soundscape. It was Hildegard Westerkamp, a collaborator of Schafer, that first introduced the practice of soundwalking. For Westerkamp, both the acts of listening and physically moving through a space opens the environment up to us in new ways. Andrea Polli paraphrases it as follows: “Soundwalking, as defined by Westerkamp is an embodied method of personally connecting with the soundscape through focused listening, while physically moving through space. The main purpose of a soundwalk is listening to an environment” (Polli 2011: 258). The intersection of both walking and listening, as Owen Chapman foregrounds it, “stipulates a consistent re-localisation of our listening perspective as paramount to coming to terms with the sonic character of an environment” (Chapman 2013). In this sense, soundwalking has also formed itself as a practice both interested in the immediacy and adaptability of walking in relation to a qualitative research practice, embodied in listening (Paquette & McCartney 2012: 135). This is an important aspect: The soundwalk is foremostly a way of navigating and understanding our environment in sound and in movement. It could thus be seen as a qualitative research method that helps us to unfold ecological entanglements of the environment that we are a part of. Soundwalking, as Frauke Behrendt puts it, can be, “understood as research and practice that is not about sound, but in sound, as well as not about walking but in walking” (Behrendt 2018: 251).

When recording the city outside, this was one of the more striking understandings. By gradually pacing through the city and focusing solely on the sounds one encounters, one opens up to new understandings of the spaces that are impossible to fully comprehend in text alone. Soundwalking is thus a form of practice that engages with an environment through the act of listening and walking, but it is not necessarily about listening or walking in itself. Hence from this perspective, soundwalking can be seen as a practice which enables the environment to be read, understood and, perhaps most importantly, interacted with through both sound and walking.The soundwalk that I have engaged with in this chapter, is a work that explores both Amsterdam and the Covid-19 virus in sound, and in walking. While recording on several occasions, it was mostly this aspect that stood out. Both the pace and the enhanced listening created a sense of vacuum, in which the city and I turned into a symbiosis that was creating the soundwalk together. However, before we continue to explore Amsterdam and Covid-19 both in sound and in walking, we should develop the idea of a listening practice grounded in phenomenology – a strain of thought that, I think, can help to further understand in sound.

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1.3 Fading into your turtle: Hearing/listening the city

The examination of sound, Idhe argues, starts with a phenomenology; for, “it is this style of thinking which concentrates an intense examination on experience in its multifaceted, complex, and essential forms” (Idhe 2007: 17). Hence Arkette turns towards a phenomenological approach in understanding cities. Arkette argues that this approach deepens the sensual and psychological aspects of subjective experiences as lived in the city (Arkette 2004: 159). For Arkette, this phenomenological approach, “adopts a body-centered paradigm in which there is no clear dichotomy between the experiencing subject and the external world” (ibid.: 159-160). This is also something Owen Chapman ascribes to a phenomenological approach, suggesting that a, “phenomenological conception asserts the body as a center of experience, where the subject and the external world cannot be intrinsically divided. Space is made relational, it is made into ‘place’ through our perception of it” (Chapman 2013). Focussing on the phenomenological sonic environment of a city thus broadens our perception and constitutes to a relational understanding between subject and environment, instead of separating both from each other.In order to further discuss the relations between listening and phenomenology, I will turn, amongst others, to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening (2002), Pierre Schaeffer’s thought through Brian Kane (2007 & 2012), as well as Don Ihde, who has written extensively on this approach in Listening and Voice, Phenomenologies of Sound (2007).

Though Ihde builds on the phenomenological thought of Edmond Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Ihde believes that their phenomenological approach is mostly grounded in visual metaphors and visuality in general (Ihde 2007: 21). At first glance, Idhe sees the notion of a ‘pure’ auditory dimension for phenomenology as problematic. For, at its core, it is concerned with a revaluation of all senses implied, since phenomenology renders the richness of a whole experience (ibid: 21). Indeed, as Jean-Luc Nancy stresses, the entanglement of different senses is as an, “intimate and delicate marriage between sensation (or feeling, it’s all the same) and the composition of the sensory” (Nancy 2002: 65). Both sight and sound are thus concerned with being ‘touched’ by one’s environment. However, for Idhe, the move away from a visually biased phenomenology towards an auditory phenomenology opens up to a new range of experiences. Simultaneously, it lays bare the underlying paradigm of phenomenology’sslightly bias towards visuality. By approaching these two phenomenological scopes in a dialectic manner, Ihde hopes to uncover new forms of interpretation which our experiences are embedded in (ibid.: 21). It thus seems necessary to separate both first. While paying close attention to the overlapping – or the “intimate and delicate marriage” – between sight and sound,

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Ihde proceeds to separate both sensory realms. I would like to follow Idhe in this gesture to focus ‘temporally’ on sound in order to reconsider and render the rich range of sensory experience. In doing so, Idhe first locates a notable quality of sound as “constant flux” marked by an obvious and dramatic “temporality” (ibid.: 53). This also strikes Nancy as a major difference between sight and sound (or music and paintings, as in the following analogy). For the latter:

never stops exposing the present to the imminence of a deferred presence, one that is more “to come” [à venir] than any future [avenir] A presence that is not future but merely promised, merely present because of its announcement, its prophecy in the instant. (Nancy 2002: 66)

The constant flux and focus on temporality thus always hint towards an imminent future whilst grounded in the now. Sound carries in it the possibility of eternity as it unfolds. As Idhe also suggests; “sound dances timefully within experience. Sound embodies the sense of time” (Idhe 2007: 85).

However, before arriving at this understanding of listening, one is often preoccupied with a primarily indexical form of listening. Sound is experienced as “sound of things” (Idhe 2007: 60). This is a mode of listening that theorist and composer Pierre Schaeffer depicted as

écouter. Écouter designates a mode of listening that, as paraphrased by Brian Kane, “is securely

bound to ‘the natural attitude’, where sounds are heard immediately as indices of objects and events in the world” (Kane 2013: 440). In addition, Schaeffer depicts a contrasting mode of listening; that of entendre. This mode of listening, which Schaeffer initially privileges, does not seek further than the sound itself to discover any external object. On the contrary, “[It] come[s] into view only when the sonic sign has been reduced to the sphere of pure immanence” (Kane 2007: 4). Indeed, Nancy also distinguishes between the multiple French verbs that resemble different forms of listening practices. Incorporating the original French text of Nancy’s

Listening, Kane notices how Nancy also rejects a listening concerned with signification of an

environment (Kane 2012: 442). In Nancy’s words: “If listening [l’écoute] is distinguished from

hearing [l’entendre] ... that necessarily signifies that listening is signifying sense” (Nancy 2007:

32; translation by Kane 2012: 443-443). In order to further understand the phenomenological practice of listening, Nancy ultimately turns towards the verb écouter instead of entendre. This is due to the Cartesian epistemology that still chambers in the etymology of entendre; “a subject, possessing the capacity for attention, who wills its direction; and an intentional object towards

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which this attention is directed, and from which it attains its meaning.” (Kane 2012: 443). In turn, Nancy sets out to provide an alternative from a subject proper that is directional. Instead, Nancy creates a subject constituted in a self-reflective, relational understanding. This move is followed by formulating a self-locating sense of self that finds itself in referral [renvoi] resonance. A subject that, through an infinite referral of resonance, refers to itself - and back again:

When one is listening, one is on the lookout for a subject, something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same as the other than itself, one is the echo of the other, and this echo is like the very sound of its sense. But the sound of sense is how it refers to itself or how it sends back to itself or addresses itself, and thus how it makes sense. (Nancy 2007: 9) This implies a notion of ‘self’ in which the ‘directional subject’ dissolves into an ecological entanglement of the environment that becomes the very subject itself. This approach, therefore, does not have to concern itself with the different implications of listening as suggested by Schaeffer. For it is in the echoes of immanent referral resonance that a subject constitutes itself. In doing so, Kane depicts how Nancy created an, “ontology of sound and self, which posits both as sharing a homologous structure of perpetual referral, is designed to offer a way of considering the subject that contrasts with the identification of the subject as the punctual I or imago—the figure who conditions the classical triad ego-cogito-cogitatum.” (Kane 2012: 446). The symbioses that occurs by listening are perhaps best described by sound recorder Pauline Oliveros, who states that: "Listening affects what is sounding. The relationship is symbiotic. As you listen, the environment is enlivened. This is the listening effect” (Oliveros in Ione 2005:5). Even though Oliveros seemingly emphasises a subject that is affecting the sonic environment - which Nancy tries to move away from - the symbiotic relationship that Oliveros mentions here hints towards a phenomenological inquiry of listening that Nancy constitutes. This could also be considered a move beyond the ‘first listening’ as depicted by Ihde for, “here again we note that a phenomenological listening is also a learning that allows the phenomena to more and more clearly show themselves” (Ihde 2007: 85). By inviting phenomena to show themselves, we, in turn, are also inviting ourselves more clearly. To engage with our environment through a phenomenological listening ultimately means to engage with ourselves. The gesture towards a new phenomenological subject that Nancy makes here, I would suggest, helps constitute a form in which we can understand in sound. It redirects our listening

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in order to reshape an ecology of sound that builds a space from a relational interdependence of sound itself. However, this does not mean we have to completely let go of Schaeffer’s approach. For building on Schaeffer’s notion of entendre, as opposed to the directional and identical ‘first’ form of listening, lays bare the identical approach that both Krause and Shaffer take in their way of listening to Soundscapes. Moreover, as soon Nancy’s approach is brought into the equation, we can again begin to unveil the ontological assumptions that lie underneath these forms of analysis. As analytical tools, I still find both Schafer and Krause’s understandings of soundscapes useful. However, on an ontological stance, I find Nancy’s phenomenology of sound crucial in order to fully understand in sound.

1.4 Afterthoughts on the Amsterdam CS-Dam soundwalk

At times during the recording, it felt as if the boundaries blurred between the sonic environment and I (the presumed ‘phenomenological’ subject). I found myself in a temporal, intimate relation with the city as perceived in sound. Walking in the constant flux, different shapes gradually flooded into each other and this constituted an interplay between the sonic environment and myself. Let’s briefly reconsider the walk I have included in this chapter: The return from the North side of Central Station towards de Dam. In the precise moment when the ferry sets sail, we can divide the sounds we hear through the approaches of both Krause and Schafer. Yet I noticed how, while recording, I did not necessarily engage with the sirens or other sounds as different components. On the contrary, the playful interactions between the different sounds occurred as a manifestation of the coexistence between different components, water; wind; boats; birds; bikes and people. It was only through re-listening and actively trying to analyse the material that I started to compartmentalise again. Both Schafer’s and Krause’s approach can certainly be used to take apart a given sonic environment, but this more likely cuts through entanglements as it tends to reify sounds in an environment.

During the walk, I encountered multiple expression of the city itself. Engaging with the city through sound helped me to understand and experience the city as a breathing entity that expresses itself through many small sounds in flux that are constantly interacting. This experience reverberates with Nancy’s phenomenological approach to listening insofar as the phenomenological subject shifts towards an engaging and symbiotic relationship between sound and space. Bodies that partake in this event extend beyond. Indeed, the city is not a perfect harmony in Krause’s terms, or a ‘hi-fi’ soundscape through Schafer’s approach. However, with the city streets being less crowded than they normally are, the soundscape breaks

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wide open and allows for more sounds to make way. This is one of the manifestations of the Covid-19 virus: The soundscape vacuum invites one to re-think and re-consider how the city expresses itself sonically. On top of this, the social distancing rules that have been conducted for some weeks also create a different relationship to people and their brief encounters and conversations. These conversations remain vague, as people are physically more distanced than usual, rarely talking face-to-face. Whilst it may only be 1.5m, this distance creates some breathing space to actually engage with all the different sounds that are entangled with the city but often ignored.

On the walking aspect, however, the free and elegant, disruptive figure of the flâneur felt, at times, a bit lost. When listening back to the soundwalk, I noticed that my own footsteps seem faster than they normally are, even when I am not recording. The angsty way in which I walk through the city can, in part, be traced back in the recording. This could be considered another manifestation of the virus’s presence. However, this slight anxiety that affects the practice of both walking and listening also helps us to further navigate the Anthropocene thesis that is unfolding; for, as Whitehouse reminds us, the Anthropocene has ‘anxiety at its heart’ (Whitehouse 2007: 54). However, walking and listening amongst the city together with the Covid-19, could, strangely enough, be considered a deep learning practice.

In the following chapter, I will build upon the decentralising qualities of a phenomenological listening practice and introduce the concept of noise in order to further disrupt normative dichotomies.

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Chapter 2. Discovering Noise; Discovering Electrical Walks

In this chapter I will focus on the concept of noise, and how it can help us to think and re-think the Anthropocene. In order to do so, I will depart from a soundwalk that took place as part of Kristina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks project. This soundwalk took place in Amsterdam last year, and has helped me to better understand the potential of noise in relation to our environment. Whilst engaging with Kubisch’s work, I will shift my focus on the practice of walking within the city by using Michel De Certeau’s metaphor of the city dweller (1984). After departing from Kubisch’s soundwalk, I will next explore the concept of noise and consider how it can make clear the ways in which the Anthropocene concept functions as a meta-narrative …. Additionally, I will illustrate the concept of noise by returning to consider the sonic presence of the Covid-19 virus and the ways in which it too functions as a form of noise. For now, I will begin with a close reading of Electrical Walks.

2.1 Electrical Walks

Though winters tend to be mild in Amsterdam nowadays, it was a notably warm day when I attended Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks back in February 2019. This edition - labeled number 74 of the ongoing project - initially marked the first ‘electrical walk’ ever to take place in Amsterdam. As part of the exhibition opening at the Sonic Acts Festival 2019, a one-hour long guided tour was presented by Kubisch herself to a small group of around ten people. I was fortunate enough to be one of them. Electrical Walks could best be described as a work in progress. It is a world-wide public walk with customized, sensitive wireless headphones that are able to convert the acoustic qualities of the electromagnetic field into audio signals. In doing so, it allows the audience to engage with force fields in public spaces that are normally ‘hidden’ from the common ear. Located in multiple cities, Kubisch maps out routes that include specifically harsh or interesting sounds that can be revealed through her headphones. In this sense, the audience wearing the headphones take part in the discovery of new acoustic spaces, by means of a ‘guided audio tour’ through a thick net of electromagnetic information waves which are normally undetected, yet omnipresent. According to the artist, every city and site has its own specific sound that is clearly distinctive from others she has worked in. It thus opens up the hidden layers that constitute the vibrations intrinsic to different places. Moreover, as a work

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that intensively studies invisible (noise) ‘pollution’, it invites the audience to understand the state of electromagnetic saturation that our planet currently endures on a grand scale.

For me, Kubisch’s Electrical Walks in Amsterdam was a rather ambivalent experience. The unfamiliar sounds of concealed realms stood in sharp contrast to the surroundings familiar from memory. For, the tour included places I have often visited since childhood, yet everything felt as if I was visiting for the first time. Due to this peculiar contrast, I often felt slightly dislocated from my usual perception of these surroundings during the walk. The headphones blocked out any surrounding sounds except for the converted audio signals of the electrical fields. This sudden replacement of previously known soundscapes into unknown audio signals made clear how I had unconsciously ascribed certain sounds to certain places; and how influential these were to my sense of ‘being present’ within a certain place. The sudden disruption of the sonic sphere was at first slightly unpleasant. However, once I started to better understand the different audio signals replacing the familiar soundscapes, the city turned into a playground - as if taken back to a childhood of wonder and discovery. This again brought to mind De Certeau’s famous analogy of the city dweller.

For De Certeau, the city embodies narratives of power. He reminds us that, within discourse, “the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies”. Nevertheless, “urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded” (De Certeau 1984: 95). In other words, perceiving walking as a form of speech, or parole, gradually grants it power to rewrite and play around with the discourse of the city itself. This is why Electrical Walks, perhaps unconsciously, triggers a form of play that allows one to reinterpret and rewrite (un)known spaces. Wandering around with Kubisch’s headphones on not only reveals hidden layers that make up evident parts of the city’s language, they also allow one to play around with and write, if you will, new forms of prose and poetry. In doing so, it allows us to stretch and bend the language of the city; to further explore and create new subjectivities. As De Certeau continues; “the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power” (ibid.: 95). It is precisely this quality that Kubisch’s walk opens up to; (re)writing the urban space. This rewriting of space can perhaps best be illustrated by my experience of visiting a famous Dutch department store during Electrical Walks.

I remember the days I skipped class to get the best discounts at De Bijenkorf's ‘de Dolle Dwaze Dagen’ ('the Crazy Foolish Days’). As I grew older, my interest in luxury consumer products waned, and I had not visited it in ten years. Kubisch’s walk took me back to the pervasive smell of expensive perfume and the buzz of consumers that had nonetheless remained

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part of my soft map and memory of the city. Before entering De Bijenkorf, Kubisch instructed us to remove the custom-built headphones from our ears and only return them once through the doors. The sheer amount of noise generated by the door's powerful alarm systems would be damaging to our ears and several fragile parts of the headphones. Immediately on entering, the overlapping sounds were astonishing: CTV cameras; cash registers; security’s intercom; elevators; phone conversations. A glass vitrine filled with luxury sunglasses made one of the most peculiar sounds I have ever heard. It turns out that the streets aren’t the cities only playgrounds; the department store revealed itself to be full of hidden noises to discover and interact with. The walk allowed for rewriting a space that may well be thought of as one of consumerism’s favourite shrines. Kubisch approached several curious employees and offered to let them try the headphones on for themselves. Their reaction ranged from laughter to looks of complete bewilderment. Upon leaving the store, we walked a bit further towards Central Station. Along the way we stopped and listened to different places where Kubisch had discovered interesting sounds whilst preparing the soundwalk. On the way back we took a tram. It was certainly the most exciting tram ride I have ever had. It was full of weird sounds all along the way with each new stop sounding different to the last. Again, the walk enabled a new experience of the city, one that uncovered Amsterdam’s hidden electromagnetic phenomena. The work offered an auditory adventure that shifted my perception of everyday reality by giving substance to invisible wavelengths and charges that I was able to playfully engage with. In De Certeau’s spirit, it lays bare the grammar that makes up the city and invites one to play around with it.

Aside from De Certeau’s compelling language metaphor - which primarily focuses on the practice of walking - Electrical walks could also be considered as a concert. Conducted by both the city and the audience, the city reveals an orchestra with an almost infinite number of digital instruments. Security systems; ATM machines; surveillance cameras; computers; mobile phones; antennas; cash registers; navigation systems; trams; any electronic device one could think of, really. Subsequently, within the prescribed routes that Kubisch has documented (staying within the concert metaphor, this would be the musical sheets, or ‘lead sheet’ including a lot of blank space for improvisation), the sounds that reveal themselves are still particularly contextual and differ from every subjective experience. The conducted concert will never be the same for any audience member. This has both to do with the way in which an audience member decides to interact with the unveiled sounds, and also with the site-specific data transmissions of the electronic environment during that specific (moment of the) day. This

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creates a somewhat immersive experience that indulges every individual within the city in its own way, while transcending the boundaries between the work and its audience.

In short, it was a phenomenal experience in the literal sense of the term. The unfamiliar sounds in an all too familiar place seemed to do something with my perception of given places - often a sense of dislocation. Kubisch’s Electrical Walks in Amsterdam enables a new experience of the city; one that uncovers Amsterdam’s hidden electromagnetic phenomena through ‘hidden’ noise. Armed with special headphones and a map marked with magnetic landmarks, the visitors are offered an auditory adventure that shifts perception of everyday reality by giving substance to invisible wavelengths and charges that are yet omnipresent forms of noise ‘pollution’ (I will illustrate why I intend to put pollution in quotation marks below). However, the question remains: How can we further understand the concepts of the Anthropocene and noise when we depart from Electrical Walks?

2.2 Noise

Firstly, I want to explore the power of noise as a concept to illuminate the relationship between

Electrical Walks and the Anthropocene. The concept of noise is notoriously ambiguous and can

be approached in a variety of different ways. As Aaron Zwintscher puts it; “[n]oise is both background and parasite, both ground and disruption, and undecidable in the difference.” (Zwintscher 2019: 55). It is thus a concept full of contradictions and potential for confusion. Here, however, I want to start with the concept as proposed in the foundational work of communication, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949) by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. After establishing this basic concept, Michel Serres’s concept of the parasite (Serres 2007); Marie Thompson’s notion of noise as an affective force (Thompson 2012); Aaron Zwintscher’s account of being-as-noise (Zwintscher 2019) and, as Electrical Walks translates noise through sound, Michael Gallagher’s sound as affect (2016). In order to keep a ‘workable’ overview of all these differing concepts, I will draw extensively from Greg Hainge’s

Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (2013). Even so, in the attempt to work towards

‘the ontology of noise’, Hainge admits that noise, “has been and will no doubt continue to be many different things to many different people” (Hainge 2013: 11). Nonetheless, I will attempt to understand noise in a way that will take these different approaches and ambiguities into account, whilst also focusing on a more ecological approach. This entails investigations of actors and their interrelations with their respective environments. The ambiguous quality of noise is, after all, an aspect that makes it so interesting to work with. My aim is to create a

Walking With Sound Cultivating Sonic Attentiveness in the Anthropocene

Cultivating Sonic Attentiveness in the Anthropocene