Listening to the inaudible: The sound of unicorns
Walking along the Seven Sisters Road
I ask my son walking next to me what he hears. His answer—“nothing.”
He had zeroed the acoustic environment to the steady stream of sounds constantly moving at our side, creating in concert a solid wall, rushing onwards, up and down its concrete path and determining ours. Its dense drone, differentiated only where a particular hum perforates the concentrated wall, is punctuated infrequently by its own sudden deafening absence, followed by an even greater surge of sounds all revving up individually soon to fall back into a compound stream again.
It was only when we turned the corner at Marcus Garvey library that he told me he could hear “shouting.”
SOUNDWORDS.TUMBLR.COM June 26, 2011, 9:23 p.m.
This last chapter concludes without concluding, not to find an ending to the idea of sonic possible worlds but to lead its possibility beyond the heard into the inaudible, that which also sounds but which for physiological, social and political, or ideological reasons, and decisions of taste and preference we cannot hear. The inaudible is what expands the invisible, what questions its boundaries and confirms the inexhaustible nature of sound. It is the critical edge of sound art and musicality, both of which share the absent, the un-sound and the as yet unheard, the imagined and the ignored, and work from their present possibility into the unheard manifestation of its sonic materiality.
The inaudible is a radical articulation but not the conclusion of a phenomenological possibilism. It is not only where doubt and astonishment suspend habits and taste and consider anew what is assumed as known before, but where we accept the presence of the unknowable. It is where perception must plunge not only into the possibility of the world but also into its impossibility: into what might not exist, what is not yet known to exist and what goes as yet unnoticed, or what might simply be imagined, but which all nevertheless might turn out to be possible. This radicalizes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a primacy of perception and proposes a “phenomenological impossibilism,” which demands we plunge into what is not known or known about, and which leads not only to the suspension of a priori knowledge and thought but to the rejection of the limits of the knowable and the thinkable, insisting we open ourselves to what appears unknowable and unthinkable and consider what the possible impossible, the inaudible means, and what it reveals about what we do hear and about what remains unheard; “. . . it must make it say, finally, what in its silence it means to say. . . .”1
This chapter tries to conjure up the unheard and the un-sound, the inaudible, not to solve their mystery but to add them to the repertoire of listening and articulation. It explores how the inaudible changes what we see and hear, and how we inhabit an audio-visual world knowing that there are other slices, variants of the same world, that coexist but are seemingly inaccessible, because for various reasons we are not equipped or willing to reach and experience them.
It tries to discover how this inaudible, invisible mobility has an impact on the sensorial sense of the seen and heard—on how we experience the Seven Sisters Road, from what we hear and what we do not hear or do not acknowledge to hear, but that nevertheless sounds and has an impact on our sense of the area as the sensorial non-sense of it. The inaudible, as the possible impossible, continues the actual and the possible and we need to start hearing it, or at least we need to start listening out for it, in order to understand the rationale of our judgment of the world and of the work as world, and comprehend its limitation reflected in what we cannot yet hear.
In this sense a phenomenological impossibilism performs a primacy of perception that reveals the rationale not only of the reflection of what is known to exist, the actual, or of what might exist, the possible, but also of that which is possibly not existing but is nevertheless imaginable, and of that which is not imaginable but nevertheless existing, the impossible, all of which play a part in the plural possibility of actuality and thus need to be accessed.
Merleau-Ponty’s primordial pursues an access to the world through a bodily knowing “to recover the consciousness of rationality,” to question the purpose and reason of critical reflection.2 The possible impossible does not recover the consciousness of rationality but discovers a consciousness of perception and uncovers what belongs to it also but remains unheard, un-experienced. It performs a critical phenomenology, which questions not only the method of reflection but challenges the threshold of the thing, the phenomenon, reflected upon.
To reach this phenomenology of the impossible, this chapter listens to the fissure between the audible and the inaudible, to think what it means, what it reveals about what we do hear, and what else there is to hear.
Electrical Walks (2004−)
Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks give us access to an inaudible slice of the world that drives and shapes the relationships and dynamics of our visible surroundings. Her specially designed headphones make it possible for us to access the impossible, in the sense of the physiologically not reachable whirr of electromagnetic activity that dominates the inaudible urban soundscape. They make audible the unheard vibrations of the city, which are beyond our frequency reach and yet are so important to our understanding of where we live and how we live there. They are like the inaudible hum of Seven Sisters Road what we ignore or recompose almost unconsciously to sound as silence the zero point of the soundscape, and yet the humming of the road and the whirring of the electromagnetic activity dominate our visual surrounding and make possible what we can do and determine what is not possible.
The quasi-deliberate unhearing of the traffic and the physiological not hearing of the electromagnetic activity are both in their own way rendering inaccessible, impossible slices of the invisible, the unseen mobility of a place, and thus restrict our access to the complexity of its visual construction—leaving us with a reduced view.
Kubisch’s participatory installations had since the late 1970s worked with custom-made headphones able to pick up electromagnetic signals and convert them into sounds. She used them for her audiences to pick up composed soundworks staged within spaces constructed by electromagnetic cables. Since the 1990s she noticed the increasing electromagnetic disturbances that infiltrated her own compositions and decided to focus her work on those instead.
Electrical Walks started in Cologne in 2004, with maps designed by the artist, charting her exploration of the city’s unheard dynamic and inviting us to follow her through its inaudible composition. She explores the underground, the mines of the cityscape, where its energy comes from and where its shape is determined in the formless flow of sound, and leads us on a soundwalk below the surface of the heard.
She expands in the early twenty-first century the twentieth-century notion of “Walking in the City.” Her walks are not focused on the pavement, on the sidewalk, on the trajectory of Michel de Certeau’s individual “Wandersmänner,” his pedestrians, mapping their singular paths and producing the city as temporal trajectories in the blind space between tall buildings.3 Rather, she buries us deep within the city’s material, observing not its build but what it is made of and what it is building: drawing toward us and from us, determining relationships and dynamics that are hidden within its visual design but whose revelation makes us rethink the provenance and purpose of that design and how else a city might be built.
We are moved away from de Certeau’s focus on the singular walker, who generates his own path, into the collective of an electromagnetic rush that pulls us along and reveals a different belonging in an inaudible organization of sound.
All the cities explored by Kubisch—Oxford, London, Berlin, New York, Riga, and many more—have different sonic profiles: old industrial sounds, digital signals, pulsing machines, . . . sound signatures that remain unheard with the naked ear but that are as particular as those outlined by R. Murray Schafer in the late 1960s in relation to the audible soundscape and thus deserve the same attention and reflection to get us to understand the complexity and dynamic of our surroundings, how we live in them presently and how their inaudible sounds might shape them into the future—how from the inaudible edge of sound, the visible emerges in its future guise.
Kubisch’s work is poetic, revealing an inexhaustible signifying flow of acoustic inarticulation beneath the surface of the seen, the knowable and the thinkable, that expands and stretches that seen and puts its boundaries into doubt; and her work is political, revealing the invisible dynamic that facilitates and determines our movements on the visible surface of the world. It makes audible an inaudible, possible impossible sound, as another slice of the many slices that make up the world; and it makes accessible and imaginable what we cannot hear, not only suspending our habits of thinking about what we know to be there, but opening us to what before we did not know was there; to reconsider what is there and to imagine what else might be there also.
Her works enter the material and structure of Francisco López’s silent Buildings [New York] to uncover their soul.
So it is said that though we have all found out that there are no unicorns, of course there might have been unicorns. Under certain circumstances there would have been unicorns. And this is an example of something I think is not the case [. . .] I think that even if archaeologists or geologists were to discover tomorrow some fossils conclusively showing the existence of animals in the past satisfying everything we know about unicorns from the myth of the unicorn, that would not show that there were unicorns.4
Saul Kripke explains that this thing found by the archaeologists or geologists, despite matching all the traits of the thing we call unicorn, is not a unicorn, because that name “unicorn” has already been given to something else: to that mystical beast that we call a unicorn and that thus exists in that name within the context of the myth, making it impossible for the fossils found in the woods to belong to a unicorn even if it looked exactly like its description in the fables. Any similarity would be coincidental rather than real, and thus would not warrant to give the fossilized animal the same name.
His reasoning why there cannot have been animals we can call unicorns moves the philosophy of language away from a descriptive theory of reference toward a process of naming as reference. The unicorn we speak of is real as the mystical beast that has been named so. It does not have to be validated in flesh and bones, and were such bones to be found they would be something else, they could not retrospectively climb into the name and its reality, which is the designation we have given it within the context of its reality.
Kripke’s theory of language as articulated in Naming and Necessity (1972) outlines, against a Kantian background, a realist philosophy that does not describe or structure the world with words but that names, as in baptizes, the objects and subjects in the world, which then remain named so in all counterfactual situations, even if their description, what they are doing and look like, and their valuation, what we think of them, change.
His language does not represent an object or subject but names it through “rigid designators” whose reference remains and is unchangeable even though everything else about the object or subject might change. In this regard, his realist philosophy of language, arrived at through a renewal of Aristotle, turns Immanuel Kant’s philosophy on its head and demands complete reconsideration of the relationship between words as names and the object, subject named.
In Kant’s idealist philosophy of language the description “justifies” the name, and thus if the description does not fit anymore, in a counterfactual situation, what was named B in that world is not B in this world. In Kripke’s realist philosophy of language, the thing is named B and remains B in whatever counterfactual situation we encounter it. That does not mean that things around thing B have not changed, or indeed that B has not changed, but it is still thing B. That is why the fabled beast that is named unicorn within the myth remains that unicorn and the bones found in the woods cannot all of a sudden become those of that unicorn also but have to be given a new name: we could call it “unicorn2”; it cannot however be called “unicorn.”
Kripke’s naming, his baptism of things rather than discovering, structuring, and ordering them according to an etymological and ontological trajectory and truth, holds some similarity to Merleau-Ponty’s primacy of perception. Both evoke a “primordiality” that might, as Richard Rorty suggests, seem “merely a Gothic curiosity, the last enchantment of the Middle Ages,” neither of which is naïve however.5 On the contrary, both understand the fallacy of habits and conventions and seek to interrupt the path of normativity by renewing our focus on perception and designation, respectively, leaving room to see the rationale of reflection and of articulation.
Kripke’s designators are rigid but they do not restrict; rather, and seemingly paradoxically, the primordiality of his realism, not to rely on description, similiarities, and differences, but to name, means the named can be a much more fluid object or subject, contextually determined rather than in relation to a preexisting register. The named is certain to be who he is—a unicorn, a dog, a human—but there are many variants of how it can be so without ceasing to be itself.
Sound radicalizes Merleau-Ponty’s primacy of perception and demands we plunge into the invisible of that which we know exists, and dive into the inaudible, that which is not known to exist yet: opening us to the possible and the possible impossible. Similarly, sound challenges Kripke to name the experience of the ephemeral and passing. By not offering him a stable object or subject to name, his designation is stretched into a naming of the possible and the possible impossible, the invisible and the inaudible—suggesting a phenomenological logic of language, not as contradiction but as challenge to both philosophical enquiries, and as extension of each other.
Sound is not an entity, or it is only then an entity when it exists within a Kantian scheme of language, as b flat, as c sharp, the sound of a lorry, or a dog, and so on. Sound as sound, as the thing in itself, as an acousmatic timespace thing, challenges Kripke to name the ephemeral and temporal and adds a phenomenological demand to his mathematical logic by bringing him phenomena that function not as objects or subjects, as entities, but sound the temporal connections between objects and subjects as things thinging, contingently, and which might remain inaudible even.
We do not hear entities but relationships, the commingling of things that generate a sonic world, which we grasp not by inference nor by synthesizing various viewpoints, but by centering, decentering, and recentering ourselves from moment to moment in the complex continuity of sound, that we name not to make a proposition nor to represent it or to testify to the veracity of its description but to grant another listener access to the heard and invite her to inhabit its sonic possible world and even its sonic possible impossible world, to name his own sounds and to consider her un-sounds and what remains unheard.
Sound’s temporality means that the baptized thing cannot be held, the name is not only contextual but also contingent, not a designator but a portal, granting entrance to an experience that will have to be renamed continually. How will Kripke designate this invisible but nevertheless present sound that is the soul of the visible—its mobility, dynamic, and agency—but does not offer him a form, an entity, and does not work as a source, but is the commingling of all there is building a world not with objects and subjects stacked against and on top of each other, but as the honeyed fabric of a timespace place?
In relation to sound, language cannot, as in a Kantian idealism, represent or describe, but it can also not adopt a straightforward Kripkian designation. It is not language, not what we say about something, but sound, that is generative, that is the world creating predicate; and its truth is not corresponding, nor positivist because it is what it sounds itself and “what belongs to it absolutely.”6 A sonic philosophy of language does not describe nor name, but grants access to its actions through the experience of its ephemeral audibility and inaudibility, out of which words come tenuously and in great doubt about their capability to communicate the heard but that try nevertheless, practicing a phenomenological rather than an analytical philosophy of language. Listening engenders a phenomenological naming that knows neither an a priori nor necessity, but performs a non-ontological and non-etymological trial to grasp and communicate what it is we hear and accepts failures and misunderstandings as its most likely outcome.
In relation to sound, Kripke’s names do not designate identity but are the portal to experience that then has to find words not to describe or structure the experience but to make it accessible, thinkable, and knowable again and again. Adapted in this way his realism is useful to understand the immanence not of the thing heard but of listening, and to grasp the ephemeral contingency of the heard.
But what about the sound of the unicorn, what is its name?
In a Kantian philosophy of language, which arguably follows and produces a visual sensibility, names function through the predicates associated with them. Man X is man X because he is the one who does this that or the other. A sonic sensibility has no man X to associate a predicate to but is itself the predicate, the verb, the doing that has taken the place of the noun and thus has become its own name.
Sound cannot be named independent of its audition. The name of the sound has to be given while hearing it within a particular and contingent context. It is a designation that is a contextual and particular naming that has no problem with abandoning etymology and knows it is passing and represents no truth but generates its own. The name of the sound cannot be assumed to exist beforehand and it cannot be deduced from a description that matches it—a thing heard does not obey a lexical definition but gets a name from what it sounds like, motivated by our socio-linguistic tendency to want other people to hear it also. We have to baptize sounds not to structure them but to grant access to them, to hear them, and to share them. This means we can consider the inaudible, the sound of the unicorn, as a sonic myth that while unheard is nevertheless real and deserves a name through which it becomes accessible as a possible impossible and gains its generative power to infiltrate a sonic imagination and make itself heard.
The purpose of naming the audible and the inaudible is not one of structuring them within a musical, an ecological, an anthropological, or other framework, but to grant access to them, to create a portal to their experience, through which we enter not via an analytical listening but by approaching tentatively and full of doubt to perform a phenomenological inhabiting that does not seek to confirm the name but to experience the sound. The sound is thus not ideal and nor is it anthropocentric; it is absolutely itself manifesting its own truth and reality rather than obeying another.
Kripke’s naming allows us to understand how sounds could have designation without reference to something else—a visual source or a structural register that inevitably suppresses its essence in a descriptive reference, which fixes and restricts what we might hear to the fulfillment of that description. However, sound also refutes the spiritual permanence that his baptism evokes. A sonic sensibility names, denames, and renames all the time, as it adds to the context of historical time and geographical place a present time that is ephemeral and passing, unstable and unreliable but intersubjective and reciprocal, holding the duration and thickness of the past and enabling the thin plurality of the future.
No fossils can be found in the woods that might or might not belong to a sound from a mythical fable or a time long gone. The sonic memory exists not in bones and stones but in its material trigger and the thick duration it carves in the present, and the future it prophesies. The audible holds the past without being named by it, and the inaudible sounds the future without yet designating what that might be.
The sound of the unicorn is the inaudible possible impossible. It cannot be called, and yet it triggers an imagination. It sounds at the critical edge of audibility hinting at an inexhaustible depth of inaudibility beneath and behind everything we hear, to sound what we might possibly hear also, but what remains, for now, inaudible—impossible. But to have the possibility of rigid designation, of naming, if not yet the name, means the inaudible has a place to sound from eventually, and grants us access to that which sounds already but we cannot yet hear.
Logic is about language, and what language can do, it is enabled and restricted by its demands and what it provides. Sound by contrast is about the world and how it generates the world. Thus, a sonic language cannot describe this sonic world but names access points for its audition and attempts a doubtful effort at communicating the heard. Kripke’s realist view focuses on the thing and brings us not into language but into the world, to the named rather than to its description. It allows us to reflect on the rationale of language, what it carries with it and what it effects, and invites us to go back to a primordiality of the object and the subject facing their own name. This is how from a “Gothic” metaphysics Kripke denies the philosophy of language its status as a first philosophy and makes us consider what we hear first.
The inaudible in the soundscape is not literally the sound of the unicorn, but the “sound of the unicorn” is what engenders its imagination. There are in the woods not sonic fossils but other, present sounds, which we do not hear and yet they impact on how we see the trees. Francis Dhomont’s Forêt profonde brings from the darkness of the woods other shades and formless forms to our imagination that start to populate and produce its place beyond a visual description in an invisible experience where much remains inaudible and yet moves the undergrowth and seeks passing names to act as portals into the reality of its sonic possible impossible world. It appears to be a matter of having the right “tools,” technologically, artistically, or in terms of sensitivity, to access these sonic possible impossible worlds that unfold in the brushwood.
Ultrasonic Scapes (2011)
Eisuke Yanagisawa’s recording of ultrasonic landscapes are not beautiful or particularly harmonious: they clip and grate, flange and crackle, whizz and hum, sounding more like scrambled signals than a soundscape, and yet they intrigue through what they hint at and make us hear between what actually sounds and our auditory imagination.
The ultrasonic recorder modifies frequencies beyond our hearing range into audible material, translating between an audible and an inaudible world, and granting access from one into the other—adding the unheard to what is audible and making the two compossible. These recordings present the inaudible as a variant of the same world and thus expand the threshold of its actuality and possibility into the invisible depth of the unheard—the impossible.
The first track of the album is of bats calling, presumably in crepuscular woods, evoking the sighting of all sorts of other creatures, real and mystical, that might live here in actuality or in possibility, and that might be heard if only we had the right device to shift their frequency within our range. The opportunity to hear this inaudible, impossible sound, invites the imagination of a host of other sounds emerging from the darkness to appear between the trees and shrubs and thicken the agency of a seemingly still landscape.
The bats’ calls serve as a portal into another world, a possible impossible world, whose impossibility is determined not by their nonexistence but by our physiology. Their clicking is the natural partner of Kubisch’s electromagnetic whirr and hints at a primordiality of other worlds that live as slices of this world in the inaccessible shade of the visible and the audible, and yet impact on what we perceive.
Kubisch’s whirr is manmade, an addition to the soundscape through our economical and scientific activity and reflecting on it. The bats’ call sounds independent of us and opens a world beyond human organization: a wilderness at the verge of our actual and possible worlds. It also precedes us and thus does hint not only at a contemporary inaudible but also at past inaudibility, things that might have lived and sounded here but that have now ceased to do so, and we will never know about their sounds or how to call them. These are the sounds of a post-humanist or indeed a pre-humanist world that reveal the Gothic souls of animate and inanimate objects and make us rethink the trajectory of descriptive referencing, which we adopted through an idealist philosophy chosen over a contingent and contextual naming that produces not an analytical but a phenomenological logic.
Of course, we know that bats exist and that they use ultrasound to find their way in the dark, but the rational understanding of this zoological fact does not thicken and mobilize the woods at night. The ultrasonic recorder grants entry into this other world, and invites us to add it to the slices we know about and consider actual or possible; it gives them a deeper depth and a darker groundlessness—and so when next I step into the semi-darkness of the early evening light, between trees and ferns, I will sense the agitation and mobility that composes my view.
Yanagisawa’s bat recorder renders the inaudible audible not to get me to one inaudible as a mere curiosity, but to open myself to the possibility of many impossibilities: to tune my sense to what I do not hear; to make me think of all the slices of actuality that are possible but remain impossible in a zoological, structural, archeological, and so forth, description, but which need to be heard in order to name, to gain and share access to them nevertheless.
To talk about the inaudible serves not to create a structural reference for the possible impossible, but to gain access to it, and to share those invisible points of access at the verge of possibility, not to finalize the unheard but to make it count. I do not want a scientific, aesthetic, or ideal descriptive reference of the inaudible but need to engage in its processes and materialities to name, dename, and rename what I think might sound but that I do not yet hear, to make you listen out for it also. For this purpose we need a language that emerges from listening rather than words that restrict what can be heard. This language needs to be part of the listening practice and share in its generative sensibility to produce words, the material of language, in response to the material of sound, and embrace the possible world of the audible and seek to make accessible also a sonic possible impossible world from the invisible actions of its inaudible things. Such a language allows us to reflect on the limitations, hierarchies, and idealities that restrict my hearing when it wants to obey a descriptive reference instead of plunging into the possible and diving into the possibility of the impossible.
A philosophy of sound does not follow an analytical philosophy of language but renders description secondary to the naming of its practice that takes care of the audible as the possible, the “what could be,” or indeed the “what there is” if we would only listen, and unlocks the possibility of the sonic impossible, understood as the as yet inaudible but nevertheless present sound. It is a philosophy that gives us access to what is there if we would look past the object into the complex plurality of its processes and materialities, the passing and unreliable nature of sound that does not fulfill its reference but makes its own.
If the sonic possible thing lacks language adequate to express its essence, the sense of its experience, rather than describe its source and properties, the sonic impossible thing lacks listeners even, but it nevertheless has an impact and thus is worth considering. It is worth talking about and listening out for, since, this is where, out of inaudible strands of sound the impossible but nevertheless real emerges and makes the audible sound.
The sound of impossible things
While the possible-thing-of-sound is an alternative state of affairs that might not convince everybody, that might not be taken into account, that might be deliberately marginalized, it nevertheless demonstrates a possibility or possibilities even, in how things might be if only we listened. It will for many remain a lesser, or less noticed influence on reality, but there is a momentum of conviction in its coherence and truthfulness strong enough to consider the “if that . . .” and come to a sonic “then what . . .” of possibility.
Beyond that “then what . . .” of the possible-thing-of-sound the inaudible meets no such conviction and cannot make itself heard. Actual listening, listening that obeys the rules of the actual world, cannot hear it. A possible impossible is to use Daniel Nolan’s words “badly behaved”:7 it does not follow the logic and non-contradiction rules of the actual world and does not produce coherence with it because it has a property contrary to its essence. But what is the property of the inaudible and how can we make it sound the essence of actuality?
If the inaudible contradicts the essence of the actual world, then it is not because what is inaudible is contradictory but because the notion of singular actuality depends on descriptive references and a priori knowledge and the inaudible is what we do not yet know about and thus cannot describe. However, it is intrinsically knowable and in its possible impossibilities it can expand what that knowledge is and what references it might produce.
The sonic possible and the sonic possible impossible, the audible and the inaudible, do not contradict but extend the logic of the actual world and challenge the scope of its language. The possible-thing-of-sound makes apparent the plurality of the object as things thinging. It brings to attention their processes and materialities and makes them graspable as sensorial things that do not obey description but trigger their own name. The inaudible augments these insights and deepens them. It has the permission to be “further away” from actuality, beyond the limits of the knowable and the thinkable, and so does not have to start with the restrictions of the actually known, and neither does it have to be limited to the imagination of the possible, but can generate the as yet unknown and unimagined from all that might sound but remains unheard—ultimately influencing the notion of the known and the imagined, discreetly expanding the idea of actuality through the incoherence of the impossible.
The audible as a sonic possible makes apparent the limitations of the notion of actuality, revealing what it hides in its opaque clarity, and the inaudible as a sonic possible impossible makes apparent that there are things we do not know yet but which are already here. The possible-thing-of-sound and the possible-impossible-thing-of-sound both have an extensional quality, they extend the actual object, the work and the world, and make the inconceivable conceivable as part of the future actual work and actual world and also remind us how to live in it.
With the possible-impossible-thing-of-sound to quote Nolan again “we allow ourselves to talk of what cannot be, in a way which allows us to nontrivially make claims about how things would be if various impossibilities were the case.”8 These impossibilities are aesthetic as well as political, facilitating the discussion of exclusion: exclusion of work, exclusion of people, and exclusion of ideas and values.
The aesthetic inaudible is badly behaved in relation to artistic and musical expectations. It falls outside the language of art to sound inaudibly something else. It remains unseen and unheard; it cannot break into the frame of visibility and audibility to be seen and counted within the work and yet it is the critical edge of artistic production, where it makes audible and sensible new slices of the work as variants of the same work that expand what that work is.
It is what advances composition and sound art production not toward an ideal but toward new sounds, and it is what keeps on opening the soundscape and my perception of it not toward a whole but toward the inexhaustible plurality of its slices. However, the aesthetic inaudible is not the “avant-garde,” the front runner, of artistic production, it is a much humbler inarticulation that is below and beneath the work and remains unheard and un-sound.
The inaudible is what artists work with in their doubt of the actual and their constant pressure on the possible. It is what challenges aesthetic givens and expands its imagination and thus it is what we should learn to listen to, what writers need to insist on trying to hear and write about, and what curators need to make accessible in the staging of the work even though they do not hear it themselves. In this sense, the inaudible-thing-of-sound is the real object of sound art and music education: training not to hear correspondences, the known, the referent, but to listen for what else might sound; to hear that in the work which has as yet no articulation but provides its strength and weight.
The inaudible refuses taste and style and knows no right sound, no actual music and musicianship, but haunts the formless shape of musicality, of organized, disorganized, and reorganized sound, and ensures the unfinishedness and imperfection of the work. It does not permit taste as it knows no reference to orientate its discernment by, and defines no value but enables the reflection of its rationale.
It remains unheard and yet we sense it in what remains alien. It is not a tone, nor a signifier; it has no semantic meaning but swings in the sounds of the possible to give them a thickness and duration that is not a present memory but a future audition. The aesthetic impossible is contingent and contextual, and while we cannot hear it at the time we can guess at its location and impact in hindsight.
It is the strand of sound in Nadia Boulanger’s Fantaisie variée, piano, orchestra (1912) that does not follow the line but sounds beside it, inaudibly questioning its path; it sounds the relationship between conventional instrumentation and percussive rhythms in Robyn Schulkowsky’s Hastening Westward (1995), without making a sound; it is the earth in Chris Watson’s Whispering in the Leaves (2010) that does not place the trees but reveals their relocation; and it is the inhabitants of López’s Buildings [New York] (2001) that breathe their rhythm without being heard. These sounds remain unheard but they are imaginable, as the inexhaustible and generative unfinishedness of what we do hear. The possible heard reveals not an end to audibility, to what sounds, but reminds us that there is always more to hear and that even listing these inaudibles, and thus potentially rendering them possible, leaves many still unheard.
Thus, the aesthetic inaudible is not nonsounding; it is not a thing that does not thing, but it is not heard. There is a deliberateness in this stance, culturally and ideologically, a desire not to hear or a disinterest strong enough to block it out, to keep it apart. The sonic materiality is there, but we lack the sensibility, will, and wherewithal to hear it.
The politics of possible-impossible-inaudible-things
The inaudible is a possible impossible, not only because it is not, but because “it cannot be,” which is to mean it should not, could not, really would not do to be. It is not only that its proposition cannot hold logically or in terms of physics; rather, it hints at a greater impossibility of inclusion and that is not trivial and that is why it is so important to listen out for it: to engage not only in the audible but in what could be heard also given the right circumstance.
The line between what is listened to and what is heard can get precariously slim. The inaudible is not the dialectical opposite of the heard but is the extension of its audibility, and ultimately also extends the visibility of the visual. It is anti-semantic, against a descriptive reference to structure things and beings, but invites the extension of what can be inhabited as semantic material, sensorial, plural, and inexplicable.
The impossible-inaudible-thing is always there, but our interpretative listening edits it out, ignores it, pushes it into the background to hear something else, something deemed important and valuable, something inline with a current notion of sense, validity, and purpose. We need the sonic possible to make visible the invisible and deal with its consequences, and we need the sonic possible impossible, the inaudible, to become able to imagine the as yet unimaginable and let it infiltrate actuality to make it real as a lived experience.
I am still not sure “what it is like,” but I know where it is. The inaudible is where expectations, aesthetic preconditioning, musical training, as well as social and political ideas determine the nonexistent, and where ideology, hope, and despair cross in the sand of social and political noise making.
Sounds from Beneath (2010–12) and SeaWomen (2012)
Mikhail Karikis’ audio-visual works focus listening on the voice, on a voicing of what has become unheard and what will soon be unheard, and sound the context and consequence of this present and immanent inaudibility.
Sounds from Beneath is a single screen video that culminates Karikis’ year-long work with ex-miners from the Snowdown Colliery Wellfare Male Voice Choir at the former coalfields of Dover.9 Karikis encouraged the ex-miners to remember, imitate, and re-sound in song their acoustic environment down the mines, which they had heard daily, but which was now inaccessible, inaudible—impossible.
The miners’ voices, their onomatopoeic explosions: whirring and roaring equipment and machines; breathing, clacking and wooshing bodies, stones and hard work, access what Kubisch’s specially designed headphones and Yanagisawa’s bat recorder make audible in the city and in the woods, underground, in the mines, whose soundscape is not accessible anymore, but whose effects remain present. Their physical sounds articulate the acoustic environment beneath in abstracted mimicry and tuneful songs that are interrupted and joined by actual words, “drill,” “shovel,” “hammer,” . . . “fire,” “underground,” . . . that cease to function as signifiers but become sounds naming themselves.
Their singing of an environment beneath the ground makes audible an inaudible slice of the world that has stopped sounding but reveals present scars and consequences in the community, in the landscape and in society, whose re-sounding is essential to hear not the rationale of the political decision to close the mines, but to inhabit and comprehend its significance sensorially and intersubjectively: to center, decenter, and recenter ourselves in this impossible world beneath, to know not what it served economically and politically, but to sense what it meant socially, for the community, for identity, belonging and a sense of self.
Sounds from Beneath sound the invisible inaudible sound of a groundless depth beyond political opinion and ideology, in a personal sphere that is mirrored in the somber but proud faces of the men, who have been made inaudible, impossible, in a society that hears other things now.
The voices admit sentiment and trigger a pathetic engagement, whose partisanship is reframed however by the images of the scarred landscape, reminding us also of what is inaudible there because of what the miners re-sound.
Their song joins the unheard and the un-sound, that which they remember to have heard in the mines with what was never heard but what was added in memory, to build a sonic fiction that is not untrue, but builds a truth about mining now. From the inaudible, its political and economical impossibility, in song, a different possibility emerges that makes us rethink the rationality and necessity of a present actuality. This sonic fiction is generative, building a possible audibility that does not document an over-there or another time, but sounds what it means at this moment.
The work is not about sound but about what does not sound anymore, what is inaudible, impossible, but what was once possible and what you can still see in the relic of a mute landscape that as fossil carries the inaudible impossible mining, and the inaudibility of its consequences too.
SeaWomen echoes the Sounds from Beneath and mirrors them on the surface of the ocean. The work is an audio-visual installation that documents and narrates the life of a community of female sea workers living on the North Pacific island of Jeju a volcanic rock between South Korea, Japan, and China. It makes audible and sensible the sound of the women divers, who in the past, through tax laws and a physiological advantage, became the main bread earners and matriarchs in a Korean culture otherwise ruled by men, but who are now, through the progress of our civilization, education, and global warming, soon to lose their standing again.
The piece foretells the disappearance of their sound that is still just audible but whose imminent inaudibility reveals the political and economical changes on the island. Making them audible now Karikis allows us to imagine their future inaudibility, what their disappearance will mean, for them and for our world, having lost a slice of its variance. The work inadvertently asks what other slices we have lost and will be losing, and whether the inescapable drive toward a global capitalism self-fulfillingly serves the aim of its assumed singular actuality.
The seawomen called “Haenyeo” dive great depths of up to 20 meters, without oxygen masks, to bring up seafood and pearls. An ancient breathing technique passed on from generation to generation allows them to stay underwater for up to 2 minutes, after which time they dart to the surface emitting an eerie whistle that sounds the sharp opening of their lungs and allows them to locate each other in the choppy sea—to look out for each other.
The 12-speaker work has been shown in different configurations, with multiple monitor setup as well as with single screen video projection, viewed sitting on mats woven from material from the area in the method of the Jeju Islanders and featuring water colors of the diver’s faces painted by Karikis, in the time he managed to hold his own breath.
It is this physical participation, the practice of the women’s breath in his paintings, the bodily commitment to understand their way of life by sharing their rhythm and voices rather than document them from afar, that gives Karikis’ work a strength and brings out not a factual landscape but a sensorial soundscape that we are invited to inhabit with him, on the mats, in the dark space of the installation, filled with sounds and images of a sonic possible world that is approaching its horizon.
The physical, breath-filled sound of the women emerging from the bottom of the sea dominates the soundtrack, subtly but insistently, helping us locate ourselves in its narrative to give us a rhythm with the women and understand their community through its invisible mobility. It brings us to the breath, the soul of the body, as it articulates the reversal of the dive in a physical formlessness, sounding the resurfacing from the bottom of the sea and the bottom of their lungs with a breathy high pitched whistle that has a body, but that momentarily might not be human.
Other vocal elements of Karikis’ work are the singing of the Haenyoe, strong swaying songs that mimic the rolling of the ocean and the rowing of boats, making audible the rhythm of bodies working together in the sea, finding a pulse together and a voice. There are also discussions and laughter that sound a joyful and solid matriarchy soon to be silenced by a capitalist system that has lost the possibility to sing together or hear each other and care about where in the deep sea each of us is. The piece witnesses their sustainable practices and observes a strong sense of community, of shared work and reward, and an obvious professional identity and satisfaction, a pride once had and visibly mourned on the aging faces of the miners in Sounds from Below. However, this ancient and exclusively female profession is now practiced by 50−90-year-old women only; for the younger generation it has become an untenable choice as jobs in the tourist industry offer a better alternative and global warming makes the catching of pearls rare. Their sound is still audible but slipping away into the dark sea never to dart to the surface again.
We, in the general sense as contemporary workers, do not sing together. Our bodies have no rhythm, no response to each other or to the environment we work in. Our inaudibility signals the abstraction of our doing into a visual context and a structural language, alienated from our own bodies and each other’s, producing a communication that often fails to communicate but does not accept its own misunderstandings in the face of its linguistic visibility.
The visible title SeaWomen makes us aware of the lack of a name for a female seaman in the English language, and the imminent inaudibility of the named means its designation soon sounds the impossible also. It is a baptism that never happened and if it happens now it will portend its own immanent impossibility. However, even if its designation sounds the impossible, the unicorn, rather than flesh and bones, its baptism remains as hope for a future situation that defies what seems inevitable now. It is the inspirational life of these women, and this hope that other such equitable lives might be possible that motivates Karikis to do his work, to show us this slice of the world not to mourn it but to see its strength and possibility, for us to name it not for what we lose but for what else might become possible.
In the ephemerality of sound the horizon between what exists and what does not is in doubt. The inaudible, understood as that in the work and the world, which for reasons of expectation, knowledge, and ideology we cannot access but that nevertheless influences our perception, should at least be assumed to be there. We need to talk about what we hear to prize it away from the restrictions of an analytical language and to articulate its own designation; and we need to talk about the inaudible as the possible impossible, which is what once sounded and still has consequences, and which is what sounds now but we cannot or do not want to hear, but which one day, when we know how to inhabit its environment, becomes the possible and the actual enabled by and hiding another inaudible yet again.
The inaudible is the verge of the soundscape. It is its portal into a plurality of worlds that are all variants of this world but which we can neither see nor hear because we do not know how to or we do not want to; and it is the criticality of the artwork, it is its radical edge over what we know, inviting us to sense beyond “what is” and “what might be” the possibility of impossibility: the invisible inaudible slices of the work, whose presence we might sense but whose materiality we cannot grasp.
The possible impossibility of the work is what gives it the strength to continually push at the boundaries of aesthetic knowledge to move us into that which we deliberately or inadvertently exclude from our sense of the work, without becoming itself audible. It is an aesthetic force rather than a sound whose sound once revealed hides and enables others still.
The possible impossibility of the world is its political, ideological, and social horizon, beyond which we pretend not to see anything even once we start to hear it rumble. It is the ground beneath which are hidden those things that do sound but which remain unheard and those that once did sound but have become silent, but often not yet mute.
Sound work that seeks the inaudible anew all the time embraces its passing ephemerality; it embraces its own essence in disappearance and accepts its fleeting property not as a structural necessity but as a generative designation. This is a predicative name that does not describe “what is,” “what might be,” and “what is not allowed to be,” but makes us sense it. Such work is aesthetico-political in that it not only encourages us to see the actual and hear the possible expand its vision, but encourages us to listen to the inaudible in the work and beyond—into the future variance of the world.
It is the artists’ job to open the possibility of the impossible, and it is the writers’ responsibility and the listeners’ challenge to engage in the inaudible to tease it out, not to come to an ideal audibility but to constantly work on the boundary between the audible and the inaudible, to make the impossible re-sound the possible and pluralize the actual.