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Phas.e Platform highlighting the undercurrents of sonic studies text_01.01

Editorial Board: Istishhad Hheva (Director & Editor-in-chief) Stephan Kreussel Lutfi Othman

05 /16 London, United Kingdom e: submit@phaseplatform.org

w: www.phaseplaftorm.org

Ownership and rights to the articles here published are retained by their respective authors.

Design by Istishhad Hheva 

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INDEX

00.00

Editorial Preface: highlighting the undercurrents of sonic studies

p. 6

Istishhad Hheva

00.01

The Underground as a Sonic Space: tracing an understanding of the Anthropocene from a subterranean perspective

p.12

Carlos Gรกrate Marquerie

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Technology is a Battlefield: an analysis through sound of the relationship between civilian life and warfare

p.24

Virginia Lazaro Villa

00.03

Shakuhachi as a Noise and Technology Interface

p.38

Dr. Mike McInerney 00.04

The Sonic Qur'an: uncovering an ontology through an aural perspective

p.52

Lutfi Othman

About the Authors

p.64

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Editorial Preface: highlighting the undercurrents of sonic studies Istishhad Hheva

The articles published in this text have one thing in common: that is to expose the undercurrents prevalent in sound related art and thought, not only through the exposure of uncommon theoretical approaches that vary in necessity depending on the various trends present nowadays in the field of sonic studies, but also through the exposure of a structural foundation to such trends which comes to light only in the rigorous effort of analysis. We selected the content of this publication with the same rigour, keeping focus on our intent of having work which cuts close to the bone of the topic undertaken by the authors: revealing, emphasising, or suggesting a structural basis 6

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which breaks with the immediate understanding of such themes.

Without a theme outlined in the call except for our mission statement, we have nonetheless managed to compile a selection of texts which have thematic congruence, not necessarily thematic in terms of the colourations of the material used in itself, but in the way which the authors use this material to uncover its constitutive elements.

Carlos Gรกrate Marquerie opens this edition with an article focusing on the mechanical waves produced within the Earth and their consequent affect, emphasising on the geological events which shape human environment, especially in cases where such effects distort socio-political and economic boundaries held in place by bordering countries, to the extent of causing rises in criminal behaviour and starvation. Highlighting the role of mechanical waves, and henceforth sound itself as an active agent on the stage of geological activity. In addition, he gives us a brief overview of humanity's interaction with the underground, starting from ancient religious interpretation to the exploitative harvesting of Earth's resources, bringing us back to sound through his focus on Fracking.

With this he argues that if one indeed comes to perceive the underground as a sonic space, one can come closer to an understanding of the Anthropocene and the possible role sound has in its constitution. Similarly, Virginia Lazaro Villa, pin points sound as an important factor within human activities, however not in terms of its geological affect, but in its aid in the tracing of the relationship between civilian life and the battlefield. In the same way that underground acoustic activity shapes human relationships, so does sound have an influence on the socio-political. With its psychological moulding capabilities, Villa argues that, sound is capable of not only maintaining the mental and emotional stability of soldiers employed by the army on the battlefield, but also incapacitate or kill individuals, and in other cases influence the consumer market. Technologies 7

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such as iPhones, she argues, are direct descendants of equipment used in warfare which nowadays have, in contrast to previous wars where the army had specific devices designed for them, have become standard equipment, linking civilian life to the horror of war through the shared ownership of such devices.

Technology from this perspective, brings us closer to distant events, but may also dislocate presence. Mike McInerney, focusing on the Shakuhachi, a Japanese wind instrument, discusses how such an instrument can be used as a tool to understand the intersection between technology and human presence of which complications are present in both the compositional and the performative. While outlining a historical understanding of Japanese culture, juxtaposed against the West and its consequent understanding of performance, McInerney provides an argument where he places the instrument as a middle point between two worlds traditionally considered opposites, implying that it may in fact link them together, creating a debate on the location of Being in the creative act. On a distinct note, Lutfi Othman, discusses the intrinsic role the sonic has in the constitution of Islam but developing an argument, based on historical and religious sources, that Islam is first and foremost a religion shaped and constituted by sound. Focusing upon the voice of the devout and the etymology of the vocabulary surrounding the Qur'an, Othman suggests that an aural perspective of the religion might indeed reveal an ontology otherwise hidden by a Western understanding of the scripture, arguing that such a new perspective may guide us in understanding Islam beyond its portrayal in the media.

Although it has been a long way coming, with all the difficulties of setting up an ambitious platform for sonic studies and its related art, we are proud to have had the chance to work with our contributors to produce this text, and appreciate all the patience and cooperation 8

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from their sides, especially at times where our project might have not become a reality due to severe complications. It has been a great learning experience and an enlightening journey towards understanding ones position within the broad community that we are engaging with. We would especially like to thank all of our supporters and are grateful of the interest people have shown in our projects.

We hope that our readers will find the same joy in the reading of our publication here present in that same way we have found joy in editing and compiling it together. Once again, a heartfelt thanks.

On behalf of the Phas.e Platform team,

Istishhad Hheva Director & Editor-in-chief

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The Underground as a sonic space: tracing an understanding of the Anthropocene from a subterranean perspective Carlos GĂĄrate Marquerie

In this article I am going to investigate the relationship humans have with the underground and its link to the Anthropocene. I will start by examining the dynamics of the Earth’s substrata and the potential agency of these dynamics on societies and biological ecosystems.

Next, how western society has historically conceived the underground based on symbolisation will be reviewed, as well as how this symbolisation helped decide our influence upon it. We will 12

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see how sound is particularly relevant in this relationship and we will define the underground as a space that is best understood if you think about it sonically. In conclusion, how this relationship with the underground leads us to the Anthropocene, a theory that argues that we are in a new geological era where the role of humans on geophysical events on a global scale is more than significant, will be assessed.

The earth is composed of three major elements: the core, the mantle and the crust. The core, a sphere of iron and nickel of about 1,220 km radius; the mantle, a malleable layer of about 2900 km thick that surrounds the core and adapts to the movements and fluctuations of this and the third layer, the lithosphere which is a layer of a thickness ranging around 50 and 300 km (Artemieva, 2011, p.1). The lithosphere, the outer layer of the earth, is composed of the lithospheric mantle and a crust and divided in tectonic plates. These plates that are in constant movement because of gravitational and magnetic forces, produce a constant but largely imperceptible tremble when brushing against each other. After accumulating so much tension they release it in the form of earthquakes that can be perceived on a planetary scale.

Even when they are inaudible, earthquakes and other seismic events are acoustical. What cannot be heard can be felt, as acoustical waves move through the earth and move ground, and subaudible sounds travel unheard from one end of the earth through to another (Kahn, 2013, p.

137).

This friction between plates is able to point towards a definition of the underground as a sonic space in itself. The vibrations found underground are, among other mechanical waves, sound. To be more specific they are infrasounds (sounds at frequencies below the threshold of human hearing) and these infrasounds along with the 13

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matter that they affect are not only influential for the underground but also for the surface. Besides the relocation of sediments and tectonic plates, these movements cause variations in human systems as well.

The following paragraphs will highlight my stated argument.

Further to the tragic loss of 10.000 lives, the earthquake in Nepal in April 2015 also destroyed the local infrastructure and thus the economy of the country. According to the NASA it changed the earth’s atmosphere: the energy released by the earthquake redistributed the electrons from the Ionosphere (NASA, 2015).

Furthermore Colin P. Stark, a professor at the Columbia University claimed in The Economic Times, that India geographically intruded Nepal by three meters and hence a restructure of the geopolitical border between the two countries took place (Stark, 2012). Five years after the earthquake in Haiti, the President of the country confirmed a death rate of 316,000 people. To this day the country is suffering from instability, which manifests itself through the incapacity of the government to re-establish the pre-earthquake conditions.

Henceforth there is a high rate of criminality, violence and overloaded refugee camps (Jones, 2015). As stated those earthquakes did not only change the infrastructure and the social environment, but also the power structures of the state. Thousands of people died and the future of those countries is in serious risk.

The underground is not only a space where massive energy waveforms are set free and where big Earth masses crash with each other. It is also a space where life is born: bacterial life is able to reach a depth of 19 kilometers underneath the surface, although most of the life forms living underneath the surface have their habitat closer to it. Creatures living underneath the surface have a primitive sense of sight or even none and thus their sense of orientation is devoted to the perception of waveforms, which travel through the 14

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earth. The mole rat, for example, is blind and communicates with the same species by hitting its head against their excavated tunnels (Bates, 2014). This produces sound that travels through the solid soil towards other tunnels. The Caribbean White- Lipped Frog buries part of its body in order to send sonic warning signs to other frogs in order to keep them away from him (Bates, 2014) Most insects are able to understand their surroundings by capturing vibrations in the ground.

(Stocker, 2013, p.122) 
 The biological and geological research of the underground is immense, but due to the difficulty of exploring this field there is still a lot to find out. The deepest man-made hole on Earth is the Z-42 borehole on Sakhalin Island off the East Russian coast, which has a depth of 12,700 metres. Until 2008 the deepest one was in Kola, Russia. The scientists working there had the idea to descend a microphone into the hole and record the acoustic activity from it, which turned out to be rhythmic in nature. Although people that were working there concluded that the origin of the sound was from human activity in the open mines around the borehole, the recordings have led to all kinds of speculation, the most common being that those sounds come from Hell. We can see here that even though we do not have much knowledge about the underground, we have filled the blank spaces with plenty of symbolisations about it with mysticism and religion. Many religious beliefs, like the antique Greek and roman one, Christianity, Islam and many more place hell in the underground. A hierarchy of heaven being in the sky, life being on the surface and hell underneath the surface was a standardised idea (Tuan, 1974, p.129).

From the fifteenth century and in later centuries, when global explorations of the Western powers begin to occur, the legends about these journeys increased and people broke away from the 15

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vertical conception of the universe. The idea of the underground as a sacred space begins to disappear resulting in the imagination of new worlds to discover within the earth itself.

The Journey of Niels Klim is an imaginary voyage, a type of narrative that emerged in the late 1400s, when actual voyages of discovery were reshaping Western civilisation. In these narratives the description of the supposedly discovered land or lands, besides being entertaining, is often intended to comment upon contemporary society by presenting an alternative at once strange and recognisable (Williams, 2008, p.26)

In 1692 Edmund Halley presented a paper, based on Isaac Newton’s studies in gravity, which claimed that the earth is partly or even completely hollow inside and hence another form of life could inhabit it. His speculation was that inside the earth there was another energy source similar to the sun. The theory about the Hollow Earth was accepted by the scientific community up the beginnings of the XIX century.

It was in this historical period that a general consensus began to emerge concerning the fact that the earth was not hollow, and scientists further speculated that the interior heat of the planet could be connected to their studies of volcanoes being intrinsic to the composition and creation of the planet (Williams, 2008, p.26).

Another change in the conception of the earth emerged in that period, an idea that according to Bruno Latour splits society (humans) and nature. It was during the romantic period that nature was exalted and mystified. They conceptualised it as something beautiful, sublime and unreachable, something separated from humanity, something that is there while we are here (Morton, 2010).

In this idealisation of nature, the Earth, its surface, the underground and basically non-biological elements play a secondary role, Ben Woodard says: 16

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In far too much continental philosophy, the earth is a cold dead place enlivened only by human thought - either as a thing to be exploited, or as an object of nostalgia (...) leaving the planet as nothing but a stage for phenomenology, deconstruction, and other forms of anthropocentric thinking (Woodard, 2013, p.2).

These forms of anthropocentric thinking that consider humans outside of the environment and the symbolisations of nature, plus the growth of capitalism and the advances in technology leads to overexploitation of the environment for economic purposes. Mines and tunnels have been built for thousands of years, but it is through the industrial revolution that the exploitation of the underground begins to be noticeable, largely by mining coal for use in the machinery needed to increase industrial production. The underground then became a space to exploit rather than a space to explore or a space to be afraid of.

This anthropocentric approach to dealing with the underground has not changed much in the last couple of centuries. Nowadays one of the clearest examples of subterranean exploitation for the benefit of humans is the practice of fracking, a way of extracting oil and gas from the underground. To locate these resources one has to analyse the resonance of sound waves transmitted into the earth by machinery designed for that purpose. This produces images of what lies underground, similar in operation to sonar technology (Stephenson, 2015, p.36). Once the oil or gas reservoir is located, a mineshaft is built in which pressurised liquid is injected in order to fracture the rock. Natural disasters are substantial because of this practice. According to a study by the EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) chemicals of the pressurised liquid would not only change the composition of the sediments but also contaminate drinking water from areas where it is performed 17

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(Banerjee, 2015). Another study conducted in the United States shows that since fracking practices are carried out in the state of Ohio, the number of earthquakes has increased considerably (Wines, 2015). In this part of America there used to be 2 earthquakes per year that reach 3.0 on the Richter scale, but since the overexploitation of the underground by fracking practice there are 2 earthquakes per day (Bennan, 2015).

It is interesting to see how the evolution in the conception of the underground has lead us to where we are today. For wealth and political influence, sonic techniques are used to know what is below us and industrial machinery is used to produce acoustical energy able to produce earthquakes. Returning to the Nepal and Haiti earthquakes and their consequences, we see a complicated mesh of agencies existing between the earth and human systems. We see how important fracking practices are in geopolitics. These subterranean practices make the underground an important element of the geopolitical chessboard and therefore in a territory to dominate and exploit. “This is a question of power relations and contested territories in a way that makes the geo- in geopolitics stand out� (Parikka, 2014, p.8). But also we can understand better the societies we live in by analysing this underground imagination and the resulting way we interact with this space.

Humans have become a determinant geophysical element. The theory of the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002, p.23) states that we are no longer in the Holocene epoch, but in a new geological era: the Anthropocene. In this new era humans have become the most relevant geological force on our planet. It is because of the economic practices I named earlier that the surface of the earth and its substrata have been irreversibly modified. Nowadays our activities impact and influence geophysical events on a scale that it is difficult 18

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to imagine. If we think about global warming, one of the features that defines the Anthropocene epoch, we see humans changing weather patterns on a planetary scale, it happens in the arctic but also in the tropics and other parts of the world.

That planetary scale is not only relevant for the spatial dimension but also for the temporal one. Even if we stop emissions originated by fossil fuel burning right now, global warming would still get more pronounced because in geological time, the events take longer and are stronger. Zalasiewicz remarks on time and the Anthropocene: The list of human impacts on the Earth system is very long. Some of these changes are well under way. Others, such as the sea level rise that is likely to result from ongoing global warming, have only just started, and will develop over centuries and millennia to come. Based on our current understanding, a case to proclaim a new epoch called the Anthropocene can certainly be made. Our changes involve the refashioning of sedimentary pathways that build up new layers of soil.

That includes the construction of those man-made strata that we call towns and cities (Zalasiewicz, 2011).

Although hard to perceive due to the great contrast between geological time and that of humans, dramatic changes on earth systems are still in progress. Changes which will open a new political and social future that will have to be dealt with. The underground has an important role in what happens on the Earth and understanding it as a sonic space, influenced by our imagination of its contents, can help us to grasp some knowledge of the current situation on our planet.  

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00.01 / Bibliography

Artemieva, I (2011). The litosphere: an interdisciplinary approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Banerjee, N. (2015) Fracking Has Contaminated Drinking Water, EPA Now Concludes. [online] Available at: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/ 05062015/fracking-has contaminated-drinking-water-epa-nowconcludes [Accessed 19 Nov. 2015].

Bates, M. (2014) Good Vibrations: 7 Animals That Use Vibrations to Communicate. [online] Available at: http:// voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/14/7-animals-that-usevibrations-to-communicate/ [Accessed 23 Nov. 2015].

Brennan, M. (2015) Oklahoma goes from two 3.0 quakes a year to two a day. [online] Available at: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/21/ oklahoma-goes-from-two-30-earthquakes-a-year-to-two-a-day.html [Accessed 19 Nov. 2015].

Crutzen, P. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature, 415(6867), pp.23-23. economictimes, (2012). Nepal quake: Part of India slid about 1 foot to 10 feet northwards. [online] Available at: http:// articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-04-28/news/ 61615964_1_janakpur-nepal-pokhara [Accessed 20 Nov. 2015].

Kahn, G (2013). Earth Sound Earth Signal Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts.. London: University of California Press.

Morton, T (2010). The Ecological Thought. London: Harvard University Press.

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NASA, (2015). GPS Data Show How Nepal Quake Disturbed Earth’s Upper Atmosphere. [online] Available at: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/gps-datashow-how-nepal-quake-disturbed-earth-s-upper-atmosphere [Accessed 20 Nov. 2015].

Parikka, J (2014). The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Standish, D. (2007). Hollow earth. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Books.

Stephenson, M (2015). Shale Gas and Fracking: The Science Behind the Controversy. London: Elsevier Stocker, M (2013). Hear where we are. New York: Springer Williams, R (2008). Notes on the Underground: An Essay On Technology, Society, and the Imagination. Massachusetts: Institute of Technology.

WINES, M. (2015). Oklahoma Recognizes Role of Drilling in Earthquakes. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/ 2015/04/22/us/oklahoma-acknowledges-wastewater-from-oil-andgas-wells-as-major-cause-of-quakes.html [Accessed 23 Nov. 2015].

Woodard, B (2013) On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy. New York: Punctum Books.

Zalasiewicz, J (2011) Interviewed by Christian Schwägerl on SPIEGEL ONLINE, 30, 11 May. [online] Available at: http://www.spiegel.de/ international/world/the-dawn-of-the-anthropocene-era-we-are-thetop-predator-on-earth-a-765362.html [Accessed 25 Nov. 2015].

Yuan, Y(1974). Topophilia: a study of environmental perception attitudes and values. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc. 21

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Technology is a battlefield: an analysis through sound of the relationship between civilian life and warfare Virginia Lazaro Villa

STATE OF AFFAIRS Being the youngest of two, I grew up influenced by my brother, who from a very young age has had a passion for military history, making war movies common in our household. Reminiscing about watching these movies together is a memory I cherish even now that I am old enough to understand what war means. However, this memory is a paradox which although evokes nostalgia, gives us a possible 24

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description as to how one understands warfare; one that entertainment has instilled through visual perception. War and political responsibilities are marketed as commodities and products of entertainment which have built an undramatic image of reality through years of ways sophisticated enough to rewrite history and our comprehension of it.

The Vietnam War was the first in history to be televised1, marking the beginning of a turn in our understanding of war. Before that, the sounds coming back from the front were patriotic songs, anthems brought by survivors or superimposed on images recorded by the state for official informative films. Paul Virilio, in relation to the radical change that the telepresence of Vietnam started, said that “[w]ar is cinema and cinema is war,” (Fast & Pegley, 2012, p.105) implying that there is no war without representation because television’s method of narration has been inherited from the tradition of cinema.

Henceforth also implying that since such audio-visual apparatus, we have come to understand warfare as a construct composed through the superimposition of sound and image, defining our Western cultural understanding and perceiving of reality as one which is shaped by montage.

With the constant presence of soldiers equipped with smartphones and their broadcasts we have a stream of real footage available through Youtube, one of which has an endless catalog of first-hand war experiences with Military GoPro videos becoming a trending topic. With digital information giving us access to these daily images of conflict around the world, the omnipresence of the screen has reshaped our gaze and in consequence, with such technology, we no longer understand the reality of war through cinema, as outlined in

1

Called the first “living-room war” by Michael Arlen (Living Room War, 1969) 25

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the previous paragraph. This experience defines our dependence on the quality and immediate accessibility of the images. Our world is now a screen with access to everything which is possible, and because of that, entertainment has become an equation to reality through the virtual world. Nowadays more than ever, we are living these spectacular deceptions, alternate realities and reenactments of the real through the screen. If in the seventies Debord (1995) declared that we lived in the society of the spectacle, nowadays one can argue that we are living in the show itself, by indeed living in a technological ocean where reality is an accessible commodity. The question that arises however, in relation to this argument is how real these Youtube experiences of war are, if reality does indeed depend on how we perceive them? And in addition, how is such an understanding constructed by the language of representation?

With that in place, I shall approach this leisure-reality merger and the historical evolution of our perception through sound technology by outlining the contemporary relationship we have with the accumulation of flesh on the battlefield; a battlefield which is intertwined with civilian life as one end of the same reality.

SONIC WARFARE AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL RACE Sound is primarily a tool of communication inherent in humans of which repertoire includes demonstration of power2 , and indeed, governments have understood its utility by employing sound as a

Historically war has a sound and musical dimension that has played an essential role in the life of troops. The use of music and sound can be tracked back to the Celts, Romans, and during the Crusades. Its presence in the field has always been for two main purposes: firstly, to communicate tactical moves; and secondly, to frighten the enemy. As we can see on the images of the recent revolution in Ukraine this is still something that happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6yR2EWN-s 2

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standard that defines identities and is able to boost the morale of soldiers, holding them in their work3 . Reflecting the research of Jonathan Pieslak (2009) where he argues that music is a necessity for those who are stationed in places of conflict. In his research soldiers described in first person how the use of digital devices that allowed them to play music were essential to them, serving as a way to achieve a specific emotional state to engage in combat or to relax.

Government and armies have developed other uses, however less subtle, and have been involved in this merger of entertainment and war, especially in cases where music was and is still used as a weapon or a tool for torture. With its essentially organic and psychological effects4 its potential has been exploited in loudspeaker research and its subsequent use on the battlefield, with evidence of its first use in the US Phony war between 1939 and 1940 (Fauser, 2014). During Vietnam, where progress was made on such technology, the US Army produced the HPS-1, a portable sound system which was first included on the Douglas C-47 Skytrain and afterwards on helicopters.5 This device, was later used in the late sixties and early seventies by the police force of the same country and others for mass civilian control. The important factor here

The creation in 1941 by the USA of USO or its namesake in uk shows us that we must give power of abstraction to the soldiers and meet their spiritual needs.

3

There are countless programs that have studied these potentials of sound. The CIA, for example, has a long history of programs like X-38 Contract, MKUltra, Project X or Phoenix Program. In Germany, the deprivation of sound began to be investigated in the Second World War and other countries such as the UK, Israel and China have followed suit. The list of countries who have meddled with sound as such is almost endless.

4

This deployment was part of what was considered a psychological program called Chieu Hoi. During the night, helicopters were used to broadcast recorded Vietnamese voices pretending to be from beyond the grave. That was known as “The Wandering Soul� tape.

5

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however is that these Military loudspeakers were predecessors of the modern stereos, of which research was subsidised by the US army during the Second World War for use in production studios.6 After the war, the Army lost interest and withdrew the funding that had made possible the investigation and these devices were able to be introduced in the consumer market, subsequently becoming popular with civilians. If in the battlefields these devices were used as a weapon, now they were being used for events in dance halls.

Currently the military is conducting research in Non Lethal Weapon (NLW) technology, the first case of which appeared in the nineties.

Categorised as acoustic NLW, it was developed by the US Army Armament Research (Davison, 2009, p.194). Although considered non-lethal, being exposed to it over a determined period of time causes permanent physical and brain damage, and can potentially kill. Currently its goal is to direct acoustic energy in order to incapacitate a target for a specific period of time using either low or high frequencies, or else interchangeable infrasound. One of the many technologies developed over the past decade by this research is the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD); a direct descendant of the loudspeakers. This weapon is able to create a defensive barrier of ultrasonic sound frequencies, focusing and broadcasting sound over distances of up to a hundred yards and capable of producing sound pressures of 153 dB-SPL. Nowadays, it is being used in law enforcement as an Acoustic Hailing Device (AHD), however its possibilities may start to be exploited for the entertainment industry with several private companies beginning to produce similar devices.

(TED, 2004)

Included within the team were Harvey Fletcher (inventor of stereo headphones) and Burris Meyers (inventor of the stereo sound system used in Disney's Fantasia).

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Music operates more subtly, but is yet another weapon at the service of the army and the state. For example, after the 11th September attacks, we saw how the voices considered disagreeable, or that threatened the government’s version of the story, were silenced.

Immediately after the attacks, iHeartMedia distributed a document titled “The 2001 Clear Channel Memorandum” to over 1200 of radio stations that the company owned (including the BBC) (Fisher and Flota, 2011, p.74). The contents of this document consisted of a list of songs with “questionable” content of which omission from their broadcasts they justified as an action taken in deference to the mood of the nation. Two years later, following the outbreak of war in Iraq, another list was produced by MTV, which contained a report recommending which video material of war, soldiers, etc. must not be issued (Strauss, 2003). These actions point to the assumption that for any government it is always preferable to suppress trauma, however, at closer inspection, thanks to Foucalt’s (1978) definition of surveillance and control, such suppression is a form of censorship.

In the first of the lists cited in the previous paragraph one can find bands like AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Megadeth, Led Zeppelin and more. The same bands that were heard in the military operation “Just Cause” conducted by the US Army against General Noriega in 1989, one of the most prominent military actions in which music was used as a weapon. H.W. Bush had started this operation with the intention of imprisoning Noriega; the Panama dictator, who took refuge within the Vatican Embassy when EU troops invaded Panama. In response to his hiding, the US decided to build a barrier of sound which bombed the building day and night with Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music from bands mentioned above. Interestingly, these bands have been also used as a weapon against insurgents in Iraq and other conflicts in the Middle East (such as Fallujah or in Abu Ghraib). Backtracking to the research conducted by Pieslak (2009) in 29

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the previous section, these are also the same bands soldiers had a preference for listening to during the war in Iraq, alongside other mentioned preferences such as Rap music; musical genres that belong to specific cultural beliefs that cast specific types of power relations and ideologies. It is important to also point out that that these same musical genres are employed for US Army recruitment advertisements and on their recruitment trucks. With this in mind, it is no surprise that during the war in Iraq, the UK and US government incentivised the troops to carry with them their portable playback devices. In the same way that in earlier times Marilyn was sent to the troops now soldiers make use of portable playback devices. With big companies working hand in hand with governments, one finds it difficult to deny that technology is a must on the battlefield. In fact, in 2009, the battlefield started to be considered a network where it is necessary for its participants to be interconnected between themselves and their weapon systems, to intelligence sources, databases and satellites, drones and also ground sensors. During the same year, the US Army had already considered the iPod Touch and the iPhone as the best tools to manage all the communication networks because of the soldier’s familiarity with these devices beforehand. This alone led the US Army to adopt these devices as part of their armament due to their easy to use characteristics and in addition because of their ability to carry secure software, making them pieces of equipment which are decisively cheaper than a manufactured version created specifically for the army.

Throughout the Gulf War there had been several testimonies by US Troops who declared that their experience was similar to playing Halo, with some soldiers who explicitly stated that the urge to open and return fire felt natural for them. (Schubart, Virchow, and WhiteStanley, 2009, p.198) The soundscapes built within war games are usually made with the intention to invite certain types of behaviour, 30

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with the most common music genres being the same type as the ones soldier are listening on the front. Video games coach and indoctrinate about making war, legitimise and justify Army interventions by blurring the line between fantasy and reality (for example, the game America’s Army 2002 was used as a tool for specific recruitment). If before the soldier were training in simulators, now they are being trained in recruitment offices by simulators produced by entertainment companies. In addition, the music that accompanies the game naturalises violence, helping soldiers deal with the concept of inhumanity on the battlefield, normalising the situation through entertainment. We should also not forget that after the shocking experience of watching real-time death for the first time on television during the Gulf War, watching 9/11 civilians dying on RTv, and seeing the images that came from the Middle East during the war on terror, the Media and Governments around the world have to change their ways of violence. No more blood could appear to the eyes of the voters, so in consequence weapons and violence has to evolve non-lethally; a degree of lethality which is now socially accepted, or at least so by the electorate.

Such observations leads us to assume that entertainment has been the reason for this reconstruction of our understanding of reality, however when one attempts to understand the underlying structure of such reconstruction, it is the technological race for representation that is the foundation of this change, for it is within the devices themselves as vehicles of representation that permit such reproductions and not in the material they reproduce itself. The same screens that allow us to see death in real time from any battlefield are the exactly the same screens that insurgents, soldiers and civilians across the world have access to. Every video uploaded, goes to the same Cloud, which is another technological device; which permits holiday footage to inhabit, and be stored in the same 31

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digital space with other material filmed in Syria or ones protesters filmed in Greece in the past years to protect themselves from the state violence. This cohabitation implies that such data can be accessed by each party stated above, for example in cases of tracking; for in the same way that our phone can be tracked by applications such as Tinder, it can potentially be used to be tracked by a Drone for assassination, as it has happened many times within the past years. The battlefield and civilian life are not just two ends of the same reality constituted by how entertainment has moulded our perception, but that it is through the technology that permits this moulding which acts as a bridge connecting these two distinct existences that they are immersed in a constant loop feeding each other.

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00.02 / Bibliography

Arnold, B. (1993) Music and war: A research and information guide.

United States: Garland Publishing.

Attali, J., Massumi, B., Jameson, F., McClary, S., Attali and McClary, afterword by S. (1985) Noise: The political economy of music. 6th edn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dando, M.R. and D, M.R. (1996) A new form of warfare: The rise of nonlethal weapons. United Kingdom: Brassey’s (UK).

Davison, N. (2009) ‘Non-lethal’ weapons. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Debord, G. (1995) The society of the spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Fauser, A. (2013) Sounds of war: Music in the United States during world war II. United States: Oxford University Press.

Fast, S. and Pegley, K. (eds.) (2012) Music, politics, and violence.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

LaBelle, B. (2010) Acoustic territories: Sound culture and everyday life. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Pieslak, J.R. (2009) Sound targets: American soldiers and music in the Iraq war. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Fisher, J. and Flota, B. (2011). The politics of post-9/11 music. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books.

Schubart, R., Virchow, F. and White-Stanley, D. (eds.) (2009) War isn’t hell, it’s entertainment: Essays on visual media and the representation of conflict. United States: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Ritter, J. and Daughtry, M.J. (eds.) (2007) Music in the post 9/11- World.

United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.

Strauss, N. (2003) THE POP LIFE; MTV is wary of videos on war.

Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/26/arts/the-pop-lifemtv-is-wary-of-videos-on-war.html (Accessed: 3 May 2016).

TED, (2004). Hypersonic sound and other inventions. [video] Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/ woody_norris_invents_amazing_things [Accessed 16 Jan. 2016].

Virilio, P. (1986). Speed and politics. New York: Columbia University.

Virilio, P. and Degener, M. (2005) Desert screen: War at the speed of light.

New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Virilio, P. (2012) The great accelerator. United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons.

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Shakuhachi as a Noise and Technology Interface Dr. Mike McInerney

INTRODUCTION The traditional associations between the Japanese shakuhachi flute and nature, simplicity, solitude and meditation might appear to render it an unsuitable bridge between the world of acoustic instrumental practice and that of live electronic sound. However it is possible to draw a line of contact between the world of the shakuhachi on the one hand and the place of technology in music on the other that touches on most facets of each. Where we might embrace the opportunities we now have, the shakuhachi is equipped to do so; where there is a risk of being overwhelmed by them, the shakuhachi provides a secure platform for resistance.

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Rather than reviewing this situation from either the standpoint of acoustic tradition or an equivalent basis from within music technology, this paper attempts to look at three key issues that sit at the intersection between them: the new soundworlds of technology, the question of human presence, both real and virtual, and the juncture where the givens of human perception and behaviour appear to meet and interact with the material world. In order to address each of these three themes in turn, methods and examples will be drawn as appropriate from shakuhachi tradition, electroacoustic theory and critical reflections on the nature of ‘liveness’ in musical performance.

NOISE In On Sonic Art (Wishart 1996), the English computer-oriented composer Trevor Wishart derides the ‘lattice sonics1 ’ (ibid., p. 8) of traditional Western composition as unsuited to the sonic resources of technology. They derive from a successful notational paradigm that was designed to enable a particular aesthetic of transmission of musical ideas in an instrumental context. However, the synthesising and reproductive powers now available through technology mean that the same aspirations for the pre-imagining and controlled production of sound in performance can now be applied to ‘noisier’ sounds – sounds with unstable or indiscernible pitch, shifting timbral character, continuous internal turbulence and/or indistinct onset and release transients.

The instrumental paradigm of lattice sonics is, however, not universal. Other traditions, dealing with other aesthetic concerns, need not have polished their instruments in the same way. Koji In which music can be ‘viewed as taking place on a three-dimensional lattice…made up of discrete pitch levels, discrete durational types and discrete timbral objects (or instrumental types)’ (ibid, p. 25).

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Matsunoba for instance points out that, while the Western tradition may have developed ‘musical instruments that can produce smooth and harmonious sounds which resonate and project adequately in the concert hall’ (Matsunobu 2007, p. 1429), many Japanese instruments ‘seem to have been designed to produce rather unfactitious sounds’ with some ‘even tailored to produce pure noise’ (ibid., p. 1430). This other aesthetic of the incomplete and unpolished, with an apparent simplicity in its closeness to nature and a complexity that arises from its impurities, may have preserved in its unevenness of timbre just those sonic qualities that make it an optimal match for this new sonic vocabulary.

Fig 1. The shakuhachi’s sonic sympathy with some 'noisier' technological sounds

Lattice sonics

Noise

Shakuhachi

Discrete pitch levels

Unstable or indiscernible pitch

Sliding pitches

Discrete durations

Indistinct onset and release transients

An approach to ornaments and dynamic range that blurs the boundary between pitches and between sounds and silence

Discrete timbral objects

Shifting timbral character, continuous internal turbulence

Timbral variation

Unpitched sounds

Sounds of continuous internal turbulence

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Even within the context of Japanese music and aesthetic sensibilities the extreme traditions of the shakuhachi have rendered it ‘something of an outsider … an eccentric among instruments and an instrument of eccentrics’ (Gutzwiller 1984; p. 53). A focus on the shakuhachi as hoki (an instrument of religion) rather than gakki (a musical instrument) has allowed it to travel furthest in the pursuit of sonic impurity. The nineteenth century master teacher and player, Hisamatso Fuyo (c. 1790 – 1845) for instance describes the path to kisoku (spiritual breath) as one that requires an ‘unclean sound’ in order for it to act as the ‘potent emetic which expels the poisonous mucus’ and that there is something ‘despicable, if someone loves to produce a splendid tone’ (ibid.; p. 60 - 61).

The shakuhachi Zen repertoire of hon kyoku then treads a delicate line between noise and the more typically musical. The result is a human expressive language of sliding pitches, timbral variation, unpitched sounds, turbulent textures and an approach to ornaments and dynamic range that blurs the boundary between pitches and between sounds and silence.

This range is of course not as substantial as that available through technology. Though the instrument has a good capacity for glissandi and within any one blown pitch there is a potential for timbral variation, its timbral range will never be a match for that of the computer. The one unpitched sound is muraike (the sharp breath sound that articulates the beginning of certain dramatic phrases) and the set of sounds of continuous internal turbulence also has just one member (the ornament korokoro) though others could be developed.

Its range of trills, vibrati and shakes, each with its own name and expressive character, could for instance provide the basis for an articulated vocabulary of ‘turbulent’ sounds. Nonetheless, the particular range of the shakuhachi’s sonic vocabulary allows it to meet these new sounds at multiple points across their spectrum.

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Moreover, on account of its heritage as an acoustic instrument, the shakuhachi is able to move freely between this soundworld and one more traditionally musical.

PRESENCE The continuing developments in media technology that occurred between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave rise to three ‘acousmatic dislocations’: those of time (‘recording’), space (‘telecommunications, recording’) and mechanical causality (‘electronic synthesis, telecommunications, recording’) (Emmerson 2007; p. 91). These three dislocations made possible the separation of musical experience from the immediate moment of instrumental or vocal performance. Nonetheless, according to the composer and theorist Simon Emmerson, while ‘most music now heard appears to present little evidence of living presence,’ we continue to ‘persist in seeking it out’ (ibid., p. 1).

The resilience of the idea of human presence in music has two faces.

For Peggy Phelan, there is something unique about the shared moment of live performance, in which ‘there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everything in’ (Phelan 1996, p.

148). Performance ‘implicates the real through the presence of living bodies’ (ibid.) and the more it ‘attempts to enter the economy of reproduction’, the more it ‘betrays and lessens its own ontology’ (ibid., p. 146). For George Fisher and Judy Lochhead (2002), the central role ascribed to human bodily presence in the performing arts can act as a reference point for understanding musical experience even in those situations in which reproductive technology has a role to play, such as the faithful performance of notated works and the relatively disembodied experience of listening to recorded music. These two aspects of the human dimension – human presence in the moment of performance, and the audible 42

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sense of human reach in the disembodied sound stream – ‘stubbornly’ remain, even as ‘live music’ becomes ‘increasingly difficult to define’ (Emmerson, p. 89).

In a technologically mediated performance, connections between acts of performance and sounding result can become difficult to discern. Performers may 'cause, form or influence [the sound] through electronically mediated interfaces under their immediate control’ (ibid., p. 90) through gestures too small to be perceived, or action and outcome may become so separated, either temporally or spatially, that no clear association can be made between them. In this context, it is the perceived relationships, even when imaginary – those ‘prepared in advance (sound files, control sequences etc) in such a way as to imply a causal link’ (ibid., p. 93) – that become the key signifiers. Here the shakuhachi comes into its own on account of the wilfully rudimentary nature of its construction. A cigar-shaped bore, with five holes and an utaguchi mouthpiece, the instrument depends on a complex series of physical gestures to articulate its full range of pitches and tone colours2. This excess of gestural information can be used to indicate as well as initiate articulating details in the sound stream3 .

However equally important to the role of the live performer as embodied illustrator of the flow of the sonic stream is the role of Having so few holes, the distance between key pitches may be as far as a minor third. Pitch differentiations are created by a mixture of half-holing and a graduated series of bowing gestures that reshape the relationship between the player’s embouchure and the body of the instrument. Shakes and turns are similarly articulated by a typology of head movements.

2

In my own work with the instrument designer Zlatko Baracskai on the Extended Shakuhachi (2006 – present), for instance, in which accelerometers are connected to the body of the instrument so that these gestures can be exaggerated and the resultant momentum data used to manipulate the sound stream in real time.

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human proportion as source of musical meaning. According to Fisher and Lochhead, musical meaning has proved somewhat resistant to ‘the specific sort of linguistic rationality that characterizes mind-based philosophies of consciousness’ (Fisher and Lochhead, p. 39). It may, in fact, be better explained through reference to ‘bodily based notions of meaning’ (ibid.). With musical movement, for example, the sense of direction and of tension and release gains much of its significance from ‘bodily experiences of moving, of spatial orientation, and of muscular feeling’ (ibid., p.41).

There are two sides to this musical metaphor of bodily engagement: one ‘interior’ – those ‘bodily engagements … inwardly felt by an individual’ – the other ‘exterior’ – those ‘outwardly observable by others’ (ibid., p. 44). A rising pitch tessitura then is an ‘interior’ metaphor in which what might be imagined as a bodily experience of rising is translated into the sonic realm. Whereas a musical passage of increasing rapidity has a comparatively ‘exterior’ quality, because the drama of increasing speed has a direct physical analogue in the ‘externally observable movements’ (ibid.) of the performers, whether real or imagined.

In this circumstance, the shakuhachi acts as a good mediator, a bridge between the noisy universe of music technology and the expressive understanding of the human listener. As a breath-based instrument that moves freely between noise and music, its phrases are naturally based on human proportion and human action even when its sonic ambit may be sustaining a dialogue with a technologically generated environment.

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JUNCTURE Dengaku I take out the shakuhachi from beneath my sleeve to blow it while waiting and the wind through the pine scatters flowers as through a dream.

How much longer will I have to play until my heart is quiet again?

The brief seven lines of the above poem from the sixteenth century Taigen Sho (quoted in Blasdel 1988; p. 81) provide a uniquely Zen slant on three givens of human experience as it encounters the material world: the experience of feeling, the perceptual experience of reality and of being as inextricably bound up with it, and the urge to find a way to transcend or coherently manage these experiences.

The performance heritage of the shakuhachi represents the same givens in a similar Zen-inflected fashion. In doing so, it offers a potential bridge between the web of human feeling and the requirements of performance in a technological setting.

In particular, two practices can be identified and extracted from this heritage to bring to bear on contemporary challenges. These two practices might be described as alternately 'integrative' and 'distinguishing'.

The sense of human music-making as potentially integrated within a broader sonic environment, for instance, is part of a longstanding tradition in Japanese aesthetics, one in which ‘nature and its sounds do not come into conflict with human beings and artificial sounds – specifically music – but that these sounds respond to and blend with each other’ (Shimosaku, 2002, p. 550). In her introduction to the 45

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Philosophy and Aesthetics of Japanese Music4 Mari Shimosaku provides a number of quotes from the sixteenth century Tales of Genzi to illustrate this connection, showing how in Japanese literature music and the sounds of the surrounding environment are seen to blend together into a singular event which richer in evocative power and connotations that either the music or the environmental sounds would have been on their own5.

This interpenetrating relationship between instrumentalist and ambient sound echoes the distinction between local and field identified by Emmerson as a ‘primary distinction in terminology’ for live electroacoustic music (Emmerson 2007 p. 92). For Emmerson, ‘local’ represents the ‘perceived relation of human performer action to sounding result’ while ‘field’ provides the ‘context, landscape or environment within which local activity may be found’ (ibid.).

In the Zen hon kyoku tradition, this integrative heritage has two faces: soundworld and performance practice. The ambient soundscape of traditional Japanese poetics is that of the natural world, a soundworld which is already fluid, continuous and unpredictable. On this structural level, these sounds of nature have much in common with the noisy vocabulary of technology identified above as well matched by the sonic vocabulary of the shakuhachi.

The performance practice of the hon kyoku repertoire compounds this sonic vocabulary with an extremely flexible pulse which enables the music to weave harmoniously through and around the sounds of whichever environment it finds itself in.

4

For the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (vol 7, pp. 545 – 555)

E.g.: ‘Taking out the seven-stringed Chinese koto which Genzi had left her, she played a brief strain as the fancy took her. It was the season for sadness, and she need not fear that she was being heard; and the wind in the pines struck up an accompaniment’ (Shimosaku, p. 550).

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In other words, the shakuhachi tradition has already developed a symbiotic pairing of instrumental design and performance practice that is optimally suitable for working along the local / field axis that appears to lie at the heart of current electroacoustic practice.

The distinguishing power of the shakuhachi lies in its meditative heritage. In shakuhachi tradition, the breathing meditation of sui-Zen is the effective first principle: blowing shakuhachi is a means whereby the embodied individual might both engage with the world and seek to transcend it. This background, and the practices associated with it, allows for a clear distinction between the use of the instrument as a source of sound for music and other arts and its function as an aid to spiritual concentration. The line between these two roles is potentially useful in thinking through our relationship to technology. Though the sounds of shakuhachi are as susceptible to acousmatic dislocation as any other sounds, its performance practice retains a resistant quality that privileges the unique, locatable, and human moment of doing.

CONCLUSION The debate about technology and the human in current musical practice has numerous dimensions. The shakuhachi, on account of its distinctive sonic resources, playing methodology and performance heritage, is located in a similar field of questions, though for different reasons and with its own set of intentions, perceptions and expectations. Between the two of them lies a field of discourse and potential creative practice that gives precedence to no one side. As such, this meeting point might be optimal place to begin a sustainable and creative dialogue about music – a meeting in some sense, of equals – between the human and the technological.  47

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00.03 / Bibliography

Blasdel, C. Y & Yamisango, Y (1988) The Shakuhachi: A manual for learning Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomo Sha

Emmerson, S. (1994) Local/field: Towards a typology of live electroacoustic music Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 1994 pp. 31-34 San Francisco: International Computer Music Association

Emmerson, S. (2007) Living Electronic Music Aldershot UK: Ashgate

Fisher, G. & Lochhead, J. (2002) Analyzing from the Body Teachers and Teaching: Theory and practice Vol 27 pp. 37 - 67

Gutzwiller, A. (1984) The Shakuhachi of the Fuke Sect: Instrument of Zen The World of Music 28/3 pp. 53-65 Paris: IMC

Matsunobu, Koji (2007) Japanese Spirituality and Music Practice: Art as self-cultivation International Handbook of Research in Arts Education Vol 16: pp. 1425 – 1442

Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The politics of performance Oxford: Routledge

Sanden, P. (2013) Liveness in Modern Music: Musicians, technology and the perception of performance London, New York: Routledge

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Simosako, M. (2002) Philosophy and Aesthetics. In Provine, Tokumaru &Witzleben, eds The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Vol 7: pp. 545 – 555 New York: Routledge

Wishart, T. (1996) On Sonic Art Amsterdam: Harwood

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The Sonic Qur’an: uncovering an ontology through an aural perspective Lutfi Othman

INTRODUCTION In this paper, I will look at the Qur’an, the holy scripture of Islam, as an object that was formed through the sound of the human voice. By doing so, this paper aims to situate Islam in sound culture as a culture of sound in and of itself and highlight the inherent sonority of the practices that constitute the Islamic faith. To do this is to highlight the particular significance of the sound of the human voice and the utterance in Islamic belief, and then expound its role in the original inception of Islam, the growth of its community and the sustaining of 52

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the religion. Consequently, this paper will not consider examples of the role that the sound of music played Islamic communities, such as Sufism, although it is undoubtedly related. Instead, this paper will suggest that prior to any implementation into the practices of the cultures that have adopted the religion, Islam itself was organized by sound, specifically, through the sound of the human voice.

Henceforth, this paper proposes a consideration of Islam through the perspective of the sonic with the premise that a sonic understanding of Islam may reveal an ontology that is otherwise concealed. By limiting the focus of this paper on the utterance, this paper intends to highlight the oral and aural nature of the historical events that make up the fabric of Islam, which is embodied quintessentially in its holy scripture, the Qur’an.

THE SONIC QUR’AN The Qur’an today barely needs an introduction. Owing to a brand of ‘Islamic extremism’, the world is constantly reminded of the Qur’an but only introduced to its sayings when it is cited in justification of heinous acts.1 To most, the Qur’an is known as a book that is not that much different in form to the Bible, the holy scripture of Christianity. This is the normative view of the Qur’an; one that is, in essence, textual, and one which fails to reflect the dynamic revelatory nature of the events that comprise the Qur’an. ‑

In Islamic tradition, Muslims believe that God spoke to humanity, through the archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, ‘in small and large portions over a period of about 22 years’ (Mir, 2007, p.47).

As U.S. President Barack Obama remarked in a speech ‘many [in America] only hear about Muslims and Islam from the news after an act of terrorism, or in distorted media portrayals in TV or film, all of which gives this hugely distorted impression’ of Islam (Obama, 2016).

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Muslims believe that the Prophet received all the revelations ‘orally from Gabriel as explicit verbal revelation given when the latter appeared to him’ (Graham, 1977, p.26). Upon receiving these revelations, the Prophet would repeat it to those who lent him their ears, and ‘with every new addition to the Qur'anic body, the Prophet would recite it to those around him, who would learn it and in turn recite it to others’ (Abdeel Haleem, 1999, p.3) During the Prophet’s time, the Qur’an was committed to memory and only existed orally. It was only a number of years after the Prophet’s death that the individual recitations were compiled into a standard, which brings us to the Holy Qur’an, as we know it today. From this, we can start to say that ontologically speaking, it would be more accurate to describe the Holy Quran as a series of recitations that are compiled in the form of a book. The basis of this ontology can be found in the very etymology of the name itself. According to religious historian William A. Graham, the Arabic word Qur’an is a verbal noun that is most accurately translated in English as ‘to proclaim, recite, read aloud’ (Graham, 1984, p.364). This is attested to by Abdel Haleem, who, in his book Understanding the Qur’an, wrote that ‘the word qur'an lexically means 'reading' and came to refer to 'the text which is read' (Abdel Haleem, 1999, p.2). According to him, the scripture often refers to itself as ‘kitab’, which ‘lexically means ‘writing’ and came to refer to the ‘written book’, which highlights that ‘the significance of uttering and writing the revealed scripture is emphasized from the very beginning of Islam, and is locked in the very nouns that designate the Qur'an’ (Abdel Haleem, 1999, p.2). On top of this, Graham noted that the Qur’an itself provides internal evidence that verifies the notion that the word qur'an designates "reciting [aloud]", stating that ‘the recurring imperative "Qul!" ("Say!"; over 300 occurrences) that introduce so many Qur'anic passages is itself a striking reminder that these texts are intended to be recited aloud’ (Graham, 1984, p.367).

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With this, we can start to acknowledge the fundamental oral nature of Islam’s scripture.2 As a text, it only achieves its intended existence on the tip of the tongue of those who recite it. It is important to make this distinction in the ontology of the Qur’an because the textual view conceals the role that the human voice performs in its existence.3 A sonic perspective, however, reveals this burden and crucially demonstrates an inaccuracy in regarding the Qur’an as a book in the literal sense. To regard the Qur’an as a book would hide its essential sonorous nature. As Kristina Nelson argued: Qur'anic rhythm and assonance alone confirm that it is meant to be heard. But the oral nature of the Qur'an goes beyond euphony: the significance of the revelation is carried as much by the sound as by its semantic information. (Nelson, 2001, p.xiv).

In this way, the Qur’an is only the Qur’an as it is intended when it is sonorous, and its sonority is vocal. This is could also be evidenced by how ‘the recitations’ travelled around the Arabian Peninsula in the early days of Islam and the role that the vocal played in the growth of the Islamic community. According to Nelson, ‘an indication of the primary importance of the sound is the fact that the official text distributed to each community was accompanied by a reciter’ (Nelson, 2002, p.257). Crucially, these reciters were there to ensure that the Qur’an was protected from alteration and distortion of its meaning. The sound of the Qur’an takes precedence over its text in determining its exactitude, as ‘the written text does not exist to

Now we can even say that it could be suggested that the Qur’an itself demands its performance!

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3This

is especially so considering that Muslims believe that the first word revealed to the Prophet was Iqra' bi-ismi rabbika!" (Recite in the name of your/thy Lord!) - Qur'an 96/1) 55

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preserve against change; it is taken for granted that oral tradition does that. Nor is the written text the ultimate referent of the oral. Oral tradition has served as the final arbitrator of the written traditions’ (Nelson, 2001, p.3).4 Thus, not only was the Qur’an brought into existence by its transmission to humanity through the human voice; it also protected it against the distortion of its meaning.

All this highlights the significance of the voice in the ontology of the Qur’an, a voice that is concealed by our normative understanding of the Qur’an as a text, instead of a set of recitations.

THE SOUND OF FAITH We can now see that the parameters of the Holy Qur’an are shaped by the human voice. As Nelson acknowledged ‘the meaning of the Qur'an is not restricted to the words: the meaning transcends the words’ (Nelson, 2002, p.259). Moreover, considering how the Qur’an forms the basis of Islamic piety, as the five daily obligatory prayers in Islam, the Salaat, requires the compulsory recitation of verses from the Qur’an, the significance of the voice in the manifestation of the Qur’an indicates the significance of the voice in the manifestation of Islam as a whole. This notion is supported by the fact that the first of Five Pillars of Islamic belief is an utterance. This is the Shahada, or the Islamic Profession of Faith, which states La ilaha illa' llah Muhammadun Rasul Allah, (There is no deity but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God). In Islam, for those who were As the sound of the Qur’an as it was recited by the Prophet was taken to be the actual ‘Sound of the Speech of God’, Muslim scholars devised a code of verbal rules that is meant to regulate Qur’anic recitation in detail, preserving it in its authentic oral manifestation, called tajwid: Muslims believe that the sound that is preserved through tajwid is that of the actual revelation; it is the language of God. Whereas the written text preserves the words, syntax, and order of materials, tajwid preserves the sound, from the pronunciation of each phoneme to the length and timbre or voice quality of each syllable (Nelson, 2002, p.258).

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not born into the religion ‘stating this declaration out loud in front of witnesses is their first step in conversion to Islam’ (Alavi, 2007, p.8).

The fact that one’s first act as a Muslim is an utterance highlights the large role that the uttered plays in the life of the Islamic community.

Thus, the Qur’an points to an entire culture that was built upon the reception of, and response to its sonorities. In this way, the Qur’an can be regarded as both a micro- and macrocosm of the significance of the utterance in Islam.

HOW DOES A SONIC VIEW OF THE QUR’AN CHALLENGE THE TEXTUAL VIEW? In this article so far, we have seen how a sonic view of the Qur’an reveals an ontology of the religion that is based on the sound of the human voice, one that is concealed by a textual view. At this point, what needs to be seen is how a sonic perspective of the Qur’an challenges the textual perspective.

For one, the textual perspective already presents problems to how the Qur’an is understood, translated and criticised. According to James Morris, the textual approach to the Qur’an is the greatest challenge to recognising it on its own terms and stems from ‘a shared body of unconscious, normally taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about the nature, language, and assumed uses of the translated English Bible, and hence of "scripture" in general’ (Morris, 2007, p.65). Consequently, the unconscious assumptions that guide novice readers of the Qur’an ‘are rooted in a set of very specific formative historical experiences and implicit conceptions of religion that is shared by Anglo-Saxon […] cultures in North America and elsewhere’ (Morris, 2007, p.65). Thus, already at the onset of any approach to the Qur’an, we can see that a sonic perspective may be

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necessary in ensuring that, at the very least, it can be analysed or criticised accurately.

A major advantage that this perspective of the Qur’an holds over the textual is that it would be possible to apply theories of sound, sound art, voice, and speech to add to the understanding of the Qur’an and how it is experienced.5 For instance, in light of what we might now call the Sonic Qur’an, we can start to appreciate it for its revelatory nature. We can start to see how Islam began with an utterance that was heard and repeated by the Prophet, and how the religion expanded through the performance of the very same set of utterances. Till today the belief is sustained by the daily performance of these utterances, as it forms the structure of Islamic piety. In this way, the Qur’an is less ‘a book’ than it is ‘every instance of the utterance performed’. As Anne Rasmussen wrote, although the Qur’an can be understood as a text, ‘its active manifestation in daily life is through the channels of aurality and orality’ (Rasmussen, 2010, p.74).6 To regard the Qur’an as a book conceals its true ontology, and stands in the way of the sonic experience that the Qur’an itself decrees. Importantly, the Sonic Qur’an points to an entire network of actions that take place within the human body in the production of the voice. Brandon Labelle emphasised this in his book The lexicon of the mouth, where he wrote:

Perhaps, this would be more appropriate because, as we have seen, throughout history, the Qur’an travelled around its community more through sound than it does through text.

5

Aurality implies not only hearing the Qur'an recited but also "taking it to heart" in the multisensory and kinesthetic way that sound - whether music, a children's laughter, a mother's lament, or a poet's cadence - is experienced. Orality refers to the purposeful activation of the text into a measured, timbered, melodic performance that is learned, practiced, and executed, in time and space. -(Rasmussen, 2010: p.74) 6

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The voice is such an effective and sensual material precisely because it comes from the mouth; it rises from the chest, up into the throat to shudder the vocal cords, to appear (for surely, it appears!) in and then from out of the mouth, rippling behind the facial muscles, the nasal passage, and along the jaw. We experience the voice by feeling it in our body. (LaBelle, 2014, p.4)

Accordingly, its location is found less between book covers, but more in the bodies and on the lips of the faithful as they recite. The book form less embodies the Qur’an than the body of the reciter itself, as the Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazalli brings to attention, ‘if the Qur’an is kept within skin, burning fire will not go near it, nor touch it’ (Ghazzali and Karim, 1993, p.209).

Through a philosophy of the voice, we can further appreciate how textual view of the Qur’an conceals the vocal ontology of the Qur’an, and how it hides the presence of God on the pages of the book.

According to Ariana Cavarero’s phenomenology of the voice, the voice always communicates more than just the content of its speech.

Prior to any linguistic exchange, the voice already presents its listeners with the ‘embodied uniqueness’ of its emitter, who makes its presence felt through an ‘ontological horizon of relationality’; a sphere of special relations between the speaker and the listener that only the voice can afford, a point that she reiterates throughout her book For more than one voice (2005). Quoting Walter Ong, she remarked that ‘since sound indicates an activity that takes place here and in this moment, speech as sound establishes a personal presence here and in this moment’ (Ong in Cavarero, 2005, p.171).

Thus, while the Qur’an lies static and dormant as the written Word of God, its life as sound is dynamic and it establishes the presence of God through his Word here and in this moment of recitation. The textual Qur’an obscures the relationality that the voice reciting the Qur’an opens up, one that goes back to the original relationality that 59

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opened up when God transmitted the Qur’an to the new Prophet through the voice of the Angel Gabriel. The textual view of the Qur’an hides the presence of God, who is made present when the reciting voice is sonorous with the recitation of His Word, and not when it lays passively on parchment or paper, as Cavarero brings to our attention: God is voice, or also breath, but not speech. Speech, according to the ritual formula "Word of God," is what God becomes through the prophets who lend them their mouths. The prophet "does not make God speak, but, at the moment in which he opens his mouth, God speaks." The word of God thus makes itself "perceptible in the medium of human language." In this language, the most essential element is, as Gershom Schloem indicates, "the sound that is at the base of every language, the voice that gives them form, that forges it by elaborating its sonorous material." In other words, it is a question of the presence in language "of something unexpressed that reverberates behind every expression.” (2005, p.21)

Consequently, the textual view of the Qur’an not only obscures its sonic ontology, but also hides the presence of God who reverberates in the bodies of those who utters the Utterance of God, and presents Himself in the sound that is emitted from the mouth of the emitter, the reciting Muslim.

TOWARDS A SONIC UNDERSTANDING OF ISLAM We have just seen that Islam as whole is greatly indebted to the acoustic sphere of speech, and that sound, especially the sound of the voice, has played an extremely important role in the beginning and the spread of Islam. Moreover, sound still continues to play as important a role in the sustainment and preservation of Islam till today. Although sound plays a part in most religions and spiritual 60

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traditions, it bears greater emphasis in Islam due to its iconoclasm.

As I have mentioned before, the advantage of a sonic understanding of Islam are the parallels of sound and its experience that is championed by the sound artist. In this article, we have seen how theories of voice shed light onto the experience of the Qur’an, which finds its true ontology in the sound of the human voice. As a primer to future research, this article alludes to the potential of understanding Islam through the sonic perspective, as throughout history Islamic belief and culture have been formed, shaped and sustained by sound. Crucially, then, a sonic understanding of Islam has the potential to present a renewed perspective of Islam, or at least new appreciation of the contexts of the old. It is important to clarify that a sonic understanding does not mean that Islam can be reduced to the sonic. Rather, I have attempted to highlight that Islam is better understood once the sonic elements in its belief and traditions are considered, and the affect that it has in the bodies of its worshipers, producing the sonic. All of this being said, taking into consideration that Islamaphobia is on the rise, while Islam continues to be the fastest growing religion in our time, new perspectives on what could improve communal harmony can only contribute to the understanding of the complexities surrounding communal tensions.

With this, I hope that this article highlights how a perspective of sound could contribute to the exploration of religion, especially if sound has played and continues to play a crucial role in the ontology of that religion, as it does in Islam.

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00.04 / Bibliography

Abdel Haleem, M. (1999). Understanding the Qur'an. London: I.B. Tauris.

Alavi, K. (2007). Pillars of religion and faith. In: V. Cornell, ed., Voices of Islam, 1st ed. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishing, pp.5-42.

Ghazzali, M. and Karim, F. (1993). Ihya Ulum-Id-Din: Volume 3. Karachi: Darul-Ishaat.

Graham, W. (1977). Divine word and prophetic word in early Islam. The Hague: Mouton.

Graham, W. (1984). The Earliest Meaning of 'Quran'. Die Welt des Islams 23(1/4).

LaBelle, B. (2014). Lexicon of the mouth. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury.

Mir, M. (2007). The Qur'an, the Word of God. In: V. Cornell, ed., Voices of Islam, 1st ed. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishing, pp.47-62.

Morris, J. (2007). Encountering the Qur'an: Contexts and approaches.

In: Voices of Islam, 1st ed. Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishing, pp.

65-96.

Nelson, K. (2001). The art of reciting the Qur'an. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.

Nelson, K. (2002). The Sound of the Divine in Daily Life. In: View Larger Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indian University Press, pp.257-261.

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Obama, B. (2016). Remarks by the President at Islamic Society of Baltimore. [online] whitehouse.gov. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ the-press-office/2016/02/03/remarks-president-islamic-societybaltimore [Accessed 30 Apr. 2016].

Rasmussen, A. (2010). Women, the recited Qur'an, and Islamic music in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Istishhad Hheva (rn. Clive Vella) is a London based electronic music performer and researcher currently reading a BA Hons. in Sound Arts & Design at the London College of Communication. His research interests gravitate towards the critical analysis of the relationship between significance and materiality in systems constituted by sound, with a particular focus to the structuralisation inherent in conceptual material and its interaction with its contextual environment. He is also the director of Phas.e Platform where he produces calls for artistic and academic work and organises showcases for international associated artists with assistance from co-founders Lutfi Othman and Stephan Kreussel. In addition, he conducts interviews with artists and curators for the Phas.e Platform Radio show which he edits with the technical and editorial assistance of Jake Manley.

Carlos Gárate Marquerie lives and works in London where is currently studying Sound Arts at London College of Communication. Gárate researches, both theoretically and in his artistic practice, the agency of Earth's materiality and energies on social systems. He works primarily with electromagnetic waves and subterranean vibrations to build his music performances and sound installations.

Virginia Lazaro Villa is a researcher and contemporary art critic based in London. Studied MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture, National Museum Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain. Editor in chief since 2015 of Nosotros, magazine and art platform specialised in contemporary art. She is also editor for magazines such us El Burro and El Estado Mental.

At the same she develops her career as art critic she continues with her research as an artist. In both her practical and theoretical corpus of work, she investigates about iconoclastic behaviours as political positioning as well as new resistances and possibilities for counterculture.

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Dr. Mike McInerney plays shakuhachi and piano. He studied mathematics and music at the University of York and has a Ph. D from Dartington College of Arts. He has studied with the composer Frank Denyer, the shakuhachi player Yoshikazu Iwamoto, the pianist Jo Peach M. Phil. B. Mus LRAM, and the enlightened Zen master, Tanchu Terayama. Mike is currently subject lead in music composition with Plymouth University.

Lutfi Othman is a Singaporean artist and researcher with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Monash University, Victoria. He is currently reading for his second degree in Sound Arts & Design at the London College of Communication in London where he is currently based. His research is directed towards the exploration the role that sound plays in shaping the parameters of Islamic piety and belief, while his creative work as an experimental musician draws inspiration from this research, investigating the parallels between improvisation and religion through the method of loopbased improvisation.

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About Phas.e Platform: Phas.e is a multi-disciplinary platform dedicated to highlighting a surging undercurrent of incisively creative and intellectual work present at the periphery of sonic studies. Through a variety of formats, Phas.e brings together sound practitioners and researchers whose work aims to contribute to the current understanding of sonic studies with provocative and rigorously critical and analytical material. As a platform, Phas.e provides an environment for contributors from a wide variety of backgrounds to explore and develop concepts which fall outside the immediate interest of current academia and artistic curation, henceforth, proliferating an alternative insight into the field of auditory art and thought.

Phas.e is an initiative by London College of Communication students Istishhad Hheva, Stephan Kreussel, Jake Manley and Lutfi Othman who are currently reading a B.A. Hons. in Sound Art & Design.

For more info find us on links below: www.phaseplatform.org www.facebook.com/phaseplatform www.twitter.com/phaseplatform www.phaseplatform.bandcamp.com www.instagram.com/phaseplatform www.soundcloud.com/phaseplatform

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