Another Resonance

AFRICA AND THE STUDY OF SOUND

Gavin Steingo

PROLEGOMENA

Heading south from the suburbs of Sandton to the townships of Soweto, South Africa, one crosses a threshold of automobile habitation. In Sandton, car windows are generally closed to avoid the heckling of roadside vendors and to create an acoustic environment of one's own desire. When entering Soweto, my local friends insist, a driver must roll down his or her windows, unbuckle the seat belt, and cruise at a steadily slow pace, especially because closed windows for an outsider (and a white person) indicate anxiety and arouse suspicion. Wide-open windows — paradoxically — decrease vulnerability, signaling a familiarity with township space, on the one hand, and a non-neurotic openness to "strangers," on the others. With windows open and pedestrians constantly brushing by the sides of the vehicle, a car's boundaries become porous. Intimacies are established through sonic exchanges (greetings, whistles, shouts) between drivers and others who inhabit the township road — pedestrians, horse-cart riders, mobile fruit vendors, and herd boys, for example.

In many central African towns and cities — such as the town of Limbe, Cameroon, where I have also conducted fieldwork — motorcycle taxis carrying as many as four passengers whiz past workers traveling in the uncovered rear beds of pickup trucks, while women carrying buckets of grain on their heads call out to young boys stealthily darting between quickly moving vehicles. Having departed Limbe toward the dense rainforest region in the south, I notice one day how the driver of a shared taxi sedan mutes the sound system that has been blasting intricate weaving guitar lines of bikutsi for the past several hours. As the driver approaches each sharp turn on the muddy forest road, he honks loudly to alert the occasional car moving in the opposite direction, and because he expects other drivers to do the same, he listens carefully, cautiously, for the remainder of our trip.

Motor vehicles are crucial technologies of mobile sound. But they are not, of course, the only ones. Back in Soweto, I notice how digital formats such as MP3s are transferred through memory sticks or hard drives, but hardly ever online. I make a plan to follow a single MP3 — perhaps a short digital music composition — as it moves from a local producer through a network of friends and acquaintances. But I quickly realize that this plan is hopeless, because the digital storage devices used by my interlocutors keep breaking, getting lost (or stolen?), being misplaced.

On a trip to Cameroon in 2008, I observe a practice closely resembling one in Mali that will make international headlines seven years later. Writing for The New York Times, Lydia Polgreen (2015) describes téléchargeurs (or downloaders), who "operate as an offline version of iTunes, Spotify and Pandora all rolled into one." Téléchargeurs download large playlists, then transfer songs to consumers for a small fee via "memory cards or USB sticks, or directly onto cellphones" (Polgreen 2015). In such scenarios, music distribution oscillates between online and offline infrastructures, variously hopping or creeping, depending on the technology employed. In Cameroon, I had occasion to interact with downloaders fulfilling a role identical to téléchargeurs, as well as with young men and boys selling cheap pirated compilation CDs. (At an Internet café down the road from the abandoned monastery where I was staying, I encountered groups of young men scamming international buyers by selling purebred poodles that do not exist.)

Another aspect I have long observed during fieldwork in Africa is the fragility of technology and the concomitant (although obviously much more serious) insecurity of human life. Although there is no need to resort to theoretical extravagances such as "bare life," it is certainly the case that in many parts of Africa human bodies are forced into spaces of extreme vulnerability. In South Africa, black bodies — particularly the bodies of black women — are vulnerable to multiple forms of violence and injury. Most relevant for this chapter are injuries to the human sensorium, to those organs of sensation (such as the ear) through which humans encounter the world. I have more to say about this later.

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The varied auditory experiences and modalities of sound production mentioned in the preceding ethnographic vignettes are almost entirely absent from sound studies. Precisely why this is so, and what such a striking lacuna may mean for an emerging discipline, is addressed throughout the course of this chapter. In what follows, I stage a series of dialogical encounters between recent sound studies literature and my ethnographic fieldwork in Africa — primarily South Africa and Cameroon. I respond to three major claims of sound studies, as noted in the introduction: (1) that technology is increasingly isolating listening subjects into individual "bubbles" — for example, in automobiles and through mobile listening devices; (2) that music has become increasingly available and ubiquitous due to technological advances in circulation; and (3) that listening is associated with biopolitical investment and efficiency. The ethnographic vignettes already suggest that these claims are extremely limited. In many parts of Africa, there exists a radically different relationship to sound. Listening carefully for these other relationships goes a long way toward "remapping" sound studies. It also challenges us to rethink the meaning of modernity itself.

SOUND STUDIES: THREE KEY CLAIMS

In this section, I engage the three claims outlined earlier by elaborating their intellectual history with reference to particular authors. While the following discussion is by no means comprehensive, it maps out the broad strokes of some of the primary preoccupations within sound studies.

Contemporary Listening: Mobile and Private

Scholars of auditory culture have established a remarkably consistent, if limited, narrative of urban listening that typically revolves around two interrelated terms: "mobility" and "privatization." While often referring back to a stable set of early- and mid-twentieth-century theorizations — notably, Georg Simmel's ([1903] 1997) writing on atomization, Siegfried Kracauer's ([1927] 1995) work on isolation and alienation, and Theodor Adorno's ([1927] 2002) critique of recorded music — it was perhaps Raymond Williams's notion of "mobile privatization" that most clearly set the tone for work that followed. For Williams, the advent of television in the 1920s marked a turning point in media history. In Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Williams (1974: 20) observed about North America and England in the 1920s and '30s: "The earlier period of public technology, best exemplified by the railways and city lighting, was being replaced by a kind of technology for which no satisfactory name has yet to be found: that which served an at once mobile and home-centered way of living: a form of mobile privatisation."

In the decades that followed Williams's Television, several theorists came to similar conclusions, although from decidedly dissimilar vantage points. Of particular relevance is Paul Virilio's brief dystopian text, "The Last Vehicle," which describes the "audiovisual vehicle[s]" of electronic media as static transportation devices characterized by "ecstasy, music, and speed" (Virilio 1989: 115). According to Virilio, this vehicle "ought at last to bring about the victory of sedentariness, this time an ultimate sedentariness" (109). For Virilio, like Williams before him, the "mobility" of electronic media is metaphorical: televisions bring the flux of an outside world to a stationary viewer located in private, domestic space.

But despite Virilio's anxious warning, cultural critics began to observe a tendency away from the virtual travel of sedentary listening and toward new practices of listening on the move. In the early 1980s, Shuhei Hosakawa described the so-called Walkman effect, the effect of a literal mobile listening and thus the "autonomy-of-walking-itself" (Hosakawa 1984: 166). Hosakawa presented a four-phase history of "musica mobilis," with the Walkman listener coming to represent the final stage. Saturated with Deleuzian terminology, Hosakawa's "The Walkman Effect" characterizes this final stage in terms of miniaturization (a capacity for increased mobility), singularization (a set of impersonal and nomadic "emissions"), autonomy ("a radically positive distance"), and meaning construction (in particular, a generalization of the surface).

Interest in mobile listening continued strongly into the 1990s. One author wrote about the "mobile, wraparound world" of the Sony Walkman, that "serves to set one apart while simultaneously reaffirming individual contact to certain common, if shifting measures (music, fashion, metropolitan life ... and their particular cycles of mortality)" (Chambers 1990: 2). Paul du Gay and the other authors of Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman similarly point to the manner by which mobile listening troubles the boundary between the individual and the common, the private and public. In their view, the Walkman marks a rupture with the past because it takes "private listening into the public domain" (du Gay et al. 1997: 106).

These early texts gave way, in the twenty-first century, to a proliferation of studies on mobile listening, with an emphasis on automobiles, on the one hand, and newer mobile listening devices (such as the iPod), on the other. More than ever before, these studies explore the border between the enclosed space of listening and the world perceived as exterior. Michael Bull (2001: 358), for example, "discusses the manner in which we lay claim to the spaces we inhabit through the automobile," where the automobile is taken to be a "metaphor for the dominant values of individualism and private property." Drawing liberally from journalistic accounts, critical theory, and interviews with drivers, he establishes an understanding of automobile listening as a form sonic enclosure that mediates experiences with the world outside the vehicle. He suggests that the auditory space of the car is a mobile "bubble" (Bull 2001: 195, after Baudrillard 1993), a "sonic envelop" (Bull 2004: 247), and a "physical cocoon" (Bull 2001: 358). Karin Bijsterveld (2010: 192), similarly, investigates how and why cars were turned into "acoustic cocoons, that is, into domains in which people experience privacy and relaxation because they consider the interior acoustics of cars pleasant and controllable." And, to provide one last representative example, Brandon LaBelle (2010: 142) argues that the automobile "lends greatly to personalizing movements through the world, cocooning itself within a stylized interior space. ... A living room on wheels, a sonic bubble, the car is a total design giving enormous power to the driver." According to LaBelle (2010), the car is somewhat unique in its coupling of auditory enclosure with the "controlling [of] public presence." He concludes, "The car is a second skin" (143).

Bull's later work on the iPod follows the same threads: he is interested, ultimately, in how people manage their daily activities through private listening. The car and the mobile listening device therefore represent two forms of mobile and private listening, two modes of cocooning, enveloping, or "enbubbling" an individual with sound. Even more so than his other research, Bull's work on iPod listening is striking for its level of cultural specificity. His respondents include "a 32-year-old publisher," "a 23-year-old systems analyst," "a 35-year-old bank manager," and "a 31-year-old IT specialist," among others (Bull 2005: 354n1). Consider how culturally specific the following words are, uttered by Joey, a twenty-eight-year-old researcher living in New York:

When I leave my apartment in the morning I grab my iPod and shove it in my pocket. By the time I get to the subway platform I am listening to my morning mix. This mix is 80s music ranging from Eurythmics to Blondie and The Smiths. It's an upbeat and a subtle mix that wakes me up and gets me motivated for my day. I will admit that some days I am not into the mood to go to work so I will put on something more sombre like Cat Power. (quoted in Bull 2005: 348)

As hip as Joey's mix may have been in the early 2000s, the entire scenario that he paints (grabbing his iPod, waiting on the subway platform, listening to retro '80s tunes, switching to Cat Power's somber sound world) would be completely alien to most music listeners in Johannesburg and Lagos, in Jakarta and Mumbai.

In fact, the histories and modalities of listening described by all of the authors covered in this section are resolutely Northern. In the best cases, this orientation is made explicit from the outset. Bull (2007: 2, emphasis added), for example, writes, "The Gothic cathedral to [the] Citroën DS to the Apple iPod represents a Western narrative of increasing mobility and privatization," while Bijsterveld, in an extended cowritten work on auditory cocooning, notes that her "empirical research is focused on Western Europe and North America" (Bijsterveld et al. 2014: 2). On the one hand, these writers simply limit their research to Northern contexts. On the other hand, however, it seems to me that their specific claims occasionally lapse into universalism. How else can we interpret a statement such as, "iPod culture represents a world in which we all possess mobile phones, iPods or automobiles — it is a culture which universalizes the privatization of public space, and it is a largely auditory privatization"? (Bull 2007: 4). At the risk of being overly pedantic, it is worth questioning who the "we" is in such an account. When Bull (2004: 243, emphasis added) writes, "An increasing number of us demand the intoxicating mixture of noise, proximity and privacy while on the move," and when Bijsterveld (2010: 201, emphasis added) observes, "A separate research industry has emerged that studies what you and I consider pleasant sounds," then we — as critical scholars — need to question who the "us" and the "you and I" refer to. As becomes very clear when reading Sound and Safe: A History of Listening behind the Wheel (Bijsterveld et al. 2014), the automobile research industry certainly was not especially interested in what residents of Soweto or Limbe consider pleasant sounds.

Modern Sound: Availability and Ubiquity

A second and related corpus of literature points to music's ever increasing availability and ubiquity. In popular media publications, the infinite availability of all music is often referred to as a "celestial jukebox." As one author writes, "The ultimate goal for music technology, 'the celestial jukebox,' is going to be reached very soon" (Wolk 2009). Another announces more dramatically in the title of his article that the "Celestial Jukebox Falls to Earth" (Van Buskirk 2006). Academics are often surprisingly close in their pronouncements. Lars Holmquist (2005: 71), for example, states baldly, "A combination of growing disc capacities, compression algorithms, and increasing bandwidth means we can have an almost limitless supply of music just about everywhere. By replacing corporate Muzak and conservative radio schedules with portable MP3 players, online music stores, file sharing, ringtone downloads, and celebrity playlists, we herald the age of ubiquitous music."

More recently, authors have essentially argued for the actual existence of the celestial jukebox under another name: the "cloud." As Jeremy Morris (2001) writes in an article on cloud-based music services, "The cloud offers an infinite space where music is ever available." As these examples illustrate, music's ubiquity and availability is usually attributed to advances in technology. Gil Weinberg (2003: 3) affirms, "Music today is more ubiquitous, accessible, and democratized than ever. Thanks to technologies such as high-end home studios, audio compression, and digital distribution, music now surrounds us in everyday life, almost every piece of music is a few minutes of download away, and almost any western musician, novice or expert, can compose, perform and distribute their music directly to their listeners from their home studios."

As was the case with the previous section on mobile and private listening, here it is important once again to ask: to whom does this writing apply? Holmquist employs that most subtle and troubling word — "we"' — while in Morris's work perspective is simply absent (the cloud simply "offers an infinite space"). Weinberg, meanwhile, presents the ubiquity, accessibility, and democratization of music in nonspecific terms, only to inject a qualifier halfway through one sentence —"and almost any western musician."