An Amplified Echo, a Carbonated Resonance

Multispecies soundscape and affective echo

Our tools of analysis block our ability to see our objects.

—Anna Tsing, Viver nas ruínas: paisagens multiespécies no antropoceno

Material responds to material, not just to us.

—Anna Tsing, Viver nas ruínas: paisagens multiespécies no antropoceno

It is always good to open a text with an insoluble dilemma, or with a mystery. With the words presented here, I try to dance, or to sing a song—at least to align my movements with my objects of choice, produce entanglements and begin to search together (2. Ibid., 38). Of course, to be fair to those reading this paper, I should explain what this is about… so… let me try:

I believe that where there is air, there is sound. I also believe that there is always something else sounding while we hear. If we focus on one sound (try this now), there is something more there that affects our listening. Sound is always layered, in sounds over sounds. In these lines, I will try to tell you a story conducted by listening, and also conducted, as John Cage desired,[1] by the songs we miss, inspired by the noises we cannot hear, the sounds that we have never had the chance to listen to (due to the limitations of our human interface), which is why we miss them. Just like Cage’s beloved spores and their sibilant music (3. Ibid., 49). Here we face hearing as a tool that can be used to perceive things. Through sound, we can recognize the difference between hot and cold, or the intensity of a rainy day. Nature is always singing; every animal is a sound maker, including me, and probably you. A few days ago, I heard this discussed on the Future Ecologies podcast The nature of sound (2019). It is important to note that some of this paper’s references come from podcasts; to write about sound is to be open to what can be transmitted orally.

To explore this more deeply, the question is not just about the position of hearing and aurality in comparison with the visual domain and the eye. As Suely Rolnik puts it, we could think about communication as not being the sole way to guide our existence (2018, 52). In this light, sound is a route to understanding the world and capturing its signals, thinking about the effects of sound on our body that go beyond cognitive attributes. That is to say, sound is always relational; it connects with the series of encounters that constitute being alive; encounters “between people, things, landscapes, ideas, works of art, political situations and others etc.” (ibid., 53). These kinds of friction produce changes in our diagrams of forces, producing different effects that open up new ways to feel, to see and to hear. These encounters affect us. Relations are mediated by language, but what I am seeking to achieve here is a text that rejects logocentrism and wants to traverse affect, intuition, thinking about subjects beyond the individual, and listening beyond its physiological aspects (or cochlear patterns, as in the important work of Seth Kim-Cohen [2009[2]]).

To listen is to be at the encounter with an other, an other that is always difference. This is my reason for starting with a profound dilemma—because the other, or the object, does not exist outside ourselves, but within. When we talk about communication and cognition, it is true that we seek a common language, something familiar. Suely Rolnik tells us, however, that we might think of an experience outside the subject and its supposed interiority, yet the “other” effectively lives within us by the way of affects (2. Ibid., 111). This experience is part of an intensive resonance (a term we will explore later in more depth). As Anna Tsing points out, referring to bacteria as the “other” (the example may seem random, but is not random at all, as you will see…), 90% of our cells are bacteria; they are with us and we need them—our bodies become with them, we are because of them. Moreover, this changes how we think about human action in the world: how can we act as we do if we do not include the other species that make us? (Tsing 2019, 73).

I said I came here to tell you a story. A story is always fictitious. I like to think with Ursula K. Le Guin (1986), that storytelling can be a way to tell about and collect the stuff of living. Fiction can be less about the triumph of a hero, or the story of a hunter and their prey. Le Guin tells us that before the weapon, before a gun, there was a bag, a container, a net, a sack to reunite questions (Haraway 2016, 40). I discovered Le Guin’s stories through reading Donna Haraway’s work. I use her words here to try to describe the movement I am scoring here: in these lines, I seek to make in a sympoietic way, as:

sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with’. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer “world game”, earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. (Haraway 2016, 58)

Fermentation is a collaborative practice that positions us in a process of cooperation with more than human beings. In it, we are co-participants in a movement of microbiological transformation that is markedly interspecies. As Anna Tsing indicates, these transformations are what is important for life on earth—located at a distance from the arborescent decisions of independent and private subjects (relating to Rolnik’s ideas), they consist of stories that develop through contamination, transforming encounters into events (Tsing 2015, 29). Every gathering in this case is therefore bigger than the sum of two parts. Fermentation is also an activity capable of preserving (while simultaneously transforming) food, contributing to a less pasteurized and homogeneous consumption. I like to think, with Lauren Fournier, that fermentation is an exercise of futurity (Fournier 2020, 100)—another term to which we will return later (I am just filling my bag with terms and ideas).

The story continues, telling you that I have been practicing fermentation with an old friend and have discovered new ways to eat, cook, follow a recipe, pass the time, smell and listen. We often film ourselves with our hands in action and alongside the juicy images, we also perceive the sounds that are typical of the actions of bubbles formed by the encounter between “good” bacteria and the right measure of sugar or salt (the ingredients that scare the dominance of “evil” colonies). The carbon dioxide in question produces sound reverberations that sometimes border on the inaudible, just as the existence of microorganisms belongs to the order of the invisible.

On one specific day (although maybe my friend does not even remember, and this is simply the obsessive fetish of sound researchers), we perceived a sound that could only be heard by the cellphone’s recorder, and was not directly audible to our human ears alone. We listened to this sound only later, just after it had been captured. This situation had me thinking for days, about questions such as: what are the vibration noises of fermentation? How does this sound articulate its power to disrupt our colonial and normative ways of eating, as well as how we perceive the world and relate to each other? Does sound research create evidence or build an empirical world from listening? It is true that soundscapes are always leaving their places of origin behind, transforming an object into an event. In the same way, I believe that fermentation transforms food, prolonging it into a future (another temporal conception), while also, as said before, preserving it. Both cases are an extension of singularities in difference, like a carbonated echo where the signal drags or spreads… What is that sound? Does it also have the power to dismantle our more stratified ways and ideas? What kind of listening is involved in this scenario, or performative gesture?

One way to enter this kind of movement, even knowing the difficulties, and therefore always trying not to capture the material through a solely (or too) human comprehension (Tsing 2019, 144), is to follow Bernie Krause’s ideas about biophony. Krause was one of the invited researchers who spoke with Future Ecologies:

When I was writing these books and trying to describe what I was hearing, what I found was— is there’s a tremendous paucity of language to describe what we hear because we’re a visual culture. So there’s a lot of material describing the visual, but almost none— just aren’t very many words to describe what we hear. So I took the idea of Murray Schafer’s soundscape, which is all the sound that reaches our ear, and in working with kids, I had to ask them when they went outside listen to sound, what were the sources of those different sounds? Are they mechanical sources? Are they human sources? Are they natural sources? What are the ways in which those sounds appear to you? How do you describe them? And so at one point in the late 90s, I introduced the term biophony, meaning the natural sounds that we hear, the collective sound that we hear from a particular habitat, but it’s just the natural sounds. It’s not anything else. It’s all the bird sounds and insects, mammals, amphibians, and so on. (Krause 2019)

About landscapes, Anna Tsing says that we often “use this term to imagine a backdrop for human action.” However, if we worry about habitability, we will have to figure out how to make landscapes animated, and the protagonists of our stories. Tsing says that “we need landscapes, spatialized enactments of livability” and that her landscapes “are a multispecies moots, enactments of the possibilities of living together” (Tsing 2019, 94). Can we think about a multispecies soundscape? Of course we could! We must. If Tsing reacts to an idea of landscape that slips between the unpredictable and the gathering of organisms, how can we fail to consider an idea of landscape that is not attached to the question of the visual? Between Krause’s biophony and the notion of polyphony, Anna Tsing creates a good score:

Polyphony is music in which autonomous melodies intertwine. In Western music, the madrigal and the fugue are examples of polyphony. These forms seem archaic and strange to many modern listeners because they were superseded by music in which a unified rhythm and melody holds the composition together. In classical music that replaced baroque, unity was the goal; this was ‘progress’ in exactly the sense I have been discussing: a unified coordination of time. In 20th century rock and roll, this unity takes the form of a strong beat, hinting at the listener’s heart. We are used to listening to music with a single perspective. When I learned polyphony, it was a revelation (…). I was forced to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together. This kind of noticing is just what is needed to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the assemblage. (Tsing 2019, 152)

A dance floor is certainly a good place for encounters. However, let us forget the four-beat rhythm for a while, and allow space for a concert of experimental noise: this situation is a better scene against which to think about the kind of encounter and effect described above. Alternatively, we could simply think about a group of people engaged together in the fermenting process. When we are at my friend’s kitchen fermenting food, it is difficult to choose a soundtrack. We usually handle our invisible companies with just a little conversation, talking about the week’s events and light topics, in gentle voices. If we follow John Cage’s example and equalize both sound and music, we could say that conversation is a way to compose a sound piece. We also know that, when fermenting food, from the perspective of the sonic event, one should expect that inaudible or low frequency sounds are part of the polyphony that is present—a multispecies soundscape that involves different forms of life being together, perceiving each other (ibid., 66).

As we finish our fermentation activities, I ask myself what I have heard. It is never a simple question. And there is no right answer. To pose this question to myself is to reconstitute it, repeatedly. There is no representational paradigm for the signals. The object always returns (the dilemma). It is like the listening protocols sessions from artistic collective Ultra-Red[3], whose works are more about hearing-compositions than sound-compositions. The activist group began investigating and creating in the 1990s, in parallel with the HIV-acceptance movement and its struggle against homophobia and other social oppressions. Tato Taborda, referring to David Lapoujade’s ideas, talks about the use of the term “sympathy” to account for “a movement in which observer and object coincide and vibrate in synchronism in the incandescent core of the meaning of the observed object, a core inaccessible by any other method of approximation” (2021, 93). There is a certain vibration within the core of the object, a dissonance; that is why the beat is not a good metaphor here. There is an inaudible vibration inside the Kimchi container, or the Kombucha jar. The object then reveals itself as an object-subject (…) endowed with a pathos with which, in a flashing instant unlike any score, the observer’s pathos coincides and merges, vibrating with it instantly and violently commotion. In the glow of the privileged instant in which intuition occurs” (ibid., 93), we “sympathize” with matter insofar as we apprehend it as pure movement (Lapoujade 2017, 62).

Recipes are open scores

Today, our topping is carp, made into small brown nuggets (…). It is tantalisingly rich and spicy, and I ask how it is made. FamTsoi explains, “You have a fish. You add salt”. She falters; that is it. I imagine myself in the kitchen with a raw salty fish dripping in my hand. Language has met its limit. The trick of cooking is in the bodily performance, which is not easy to explain. The same is true for mushroom picking, more dance than classification. It is a dance that partners here with many dancing lives.

—Anna Tsing, Viver nas ruínas: paisagens multiespécies no antropoceno

And I remember a teacher who taught raw food classes, at the university, with a very political perspective. She said, “oh, do you want me to give you a recipe? The recipe is: take the banana, peel the banana. That’s it.” I also remember my mother when I tried to ferment yogurt at home for the first time. (In this case it is not about the relation to the recipe.) I tried to follow the recipe like an hermetic score. I had almost forgotten that my mother, like my grandmother, had fermented things throughout my life, using only their intuition as a guide. Fermentation seems to lead us to handle recipes like open scores. Their notation is something less representational and more connected to a direction to action. If it says to you, “act,” then let us peel the banana.

Until now, we have looked at ways to encounter and handle objects that can be channeled through sympathy. Remember what I said about resonance? If we open the score, we can ask ourselves if the principle that guides the kind of relation we are discussing here is not the echo, but the resonances of sympathy (or even sympoietic resonances, why not?) vibrations. If resonance, as Tato Taborda puts it, is spontaneous and caused by frequency affinities (acoustic, or affective and subjective, to return to Suely Rolnik), it refers to a mutual cycle. Resonance encompasses an encounter between two bodies that is more than the sum of the parts (Taborda 2021, 19). It is also a mode of relation that activates ways of being and individual and collective vibrations that connects us to the forces of life, helping us to do worldings (ibid., 21). Between us and the food we ferment, there is more mode of relation than merely two agents facing each other—we make ourselves vibrate. The cabbage, salt, and bacteria all have their own voices and scores, but these scores inhabit us, somehow, latently.

If we think about resonance between two humans, we could think about different languages and gestures that create vibration from two voices, creating space. This is unlike the echo, when an input implies “a wave that propagates until rest.” An echo only repeats the original message (2. Ibid., 119). Bodies, whether human or more than human, when in resonance, produce modulation since participating in a different process of sound propagation occurs when we allow ourselves to be grasped by identifiable frequencies. Taborda says that in the case of an echo, bodies act like conductive vehicles that move the fragments but without making displacements, resulting in a passive relation (ibid., 125).

Meanwhile, Brandon LaBelle reminds us that the dub mix of reggae has delays and echoes as central aspects. This sonic structure presents rhythms and tonalities that make us think about itinerant lives and migration, like forces of resistance in a sense that dislocates, through remixes, origins “in favor of flexibility and transience, resilience and displacement” (LaBelle 2018, 117).

From within the electronic delays saturating the music, one may detect the ecstatic arrival of a type of unification; according to a logic of displacement, of singularity always being prolonged into repetitions, of not quite the same – delays are not duplications, rather they spiral in and around origin, mutating as they go; from within this echo world (…) reggae culture constructs a form of wholeness. (ibid., 117)

When thinking about the migration of sound, practices of diversality, diffraction, and echo form, in the face of the logics of western colonial capitalism, as LaBelle suggests, “a type of archipelagic imaginary by which to skirt the grip of the colonial hand” (ibid., 118). We can transform our soundscape-metaphor again. Since we can now think not only about the Jamaican soundsystem, but can also look to the practice of sampling, we must begin to think about rap and hip-hop songs, in which language seems less immutable as violent forces consolidate it. In this kind of music, there is a flow, an energy that reverberates in something that vibrates through repetition.

Thing of the past, signal of the future

The fleeting and punctuated event of sound is one of transience and transition; an itinerant and migratory sensorial matter, sound is both a thing of the past and a signal of the future; it point us toward what has happened – for every sound is an index of an event that, by the time we hear it, has already transpired – while equally pulling us forward by echoing beyond, toward a distance over there. The articulated presence of any sound, at one and the same moment, is to be found in its disappearance and its becoming.

— Brandon LaBelle, Sonic Agency: Sound and emergent Forms of Resistance

Here I feel kinship with the artist, and my friend, Jonas Van, who talks on the FERA LIVRE (2021) podcast (in the episode Epistemologia do gesto [Epistemology of gesture]) about a refusal in relation to the separation between bodies and matter. He seeks an ecology (for lack of a better term) that does not measure up to an ecology centered on the white, male and cisgender subject. This kind of practice denies forms of life, worldings, and imposes on us a certain way of dealing with time. Fermentation places us in another relation with temporality; it is a way to reconnect with practices that have been silent and make them louder. It is a way of reclaiming. I often talk with Jonas about fermentation. On this podcast, he says that fermentation is something that happens all the time, because we are transmuting matter and energy all the time. And this time doesn’t fit the linear, chronological model. Things do not necessarily have an end, but we must die somehow, to live. When you presuppose rottenness, things recreate life. It is like that with fermentation, sometimes. We make a lot of Kimchi out of cabbage—also as an exercise in futurity. Yesterday, Jonas Van wrote to me about a dream he had; we were together inside something similar to a time machine. There are vibrations in his dream that inhabit me in latency.

Yes, our ability to hear objects must still face a thick and misty cloud, created in part by the difficulties of our methodological apparatus. Nevertheless, it is no use not to try, or to insist on a hermetic and mute relationship. I cannot just read things and tell you aseptically what I have learned. I tell stories as I try to write, to talk, or to sound like someone who is excited about something new and about a new life appearing. It is a vibrant matter[4]the world, my bag, these lines are full of such matter. Like the Kombucha that grows in my kitchen now. Maybe like me, you, my computer, a cat that stares at me. Scores for us all to become with.