I am (not) a crocodile: Earlids and the thinking person (11/15/24)

Image of a crocodile in lights from ZooLights at Lincoln Park Zoo

Earlids, or rather their absence, are a common trope of Soundscape literature. The idea is a stand-in for sound’s penetrative abilities; without earlids, the narrative goes, we cannot block noise.

The idea takes shape in its modern iteration from R Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape (1977/r1994, p. 11):

The sense of hearing cannot be closed off at will. There are no earlids. When we go to sleep, our perception of sound is the last door to close and it is also the first to open when we awaken. These facts have prompted McLuhan to write: “Terror is the normal state of any oral society for in it everything affects everything all the time.” The ear’s only protection is an elaborate psychological mechanism for filtering out undesirable sound in order to concentrate on what is desirable….

While it is Schafer who is most often quoted, McLuhan and Fiore had introduced the image a decade previous in The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001 p. 111): “We can’t shut out sound automatically. We are simply not equipped with earlids.” (Emphasis mine).

Neither “willful” closing of the ear (Schafer) nor an “automatic” closing (McLuhan) being allowable by virtue of our biology as humans, we moderns must inevitably be bathed in the surround-sound of the world around us. Or so we have come to assert.

Well, crocodiles do have earlids. This somewhat (to me) astonishing revelation has been widely discussed since the mid-nineteenth century. Crocodiles, Wever determined in 1971 (PNAS), have excellent hearing, which is best in the midrange and drops off strongly in the lower register. The tympanic membrane or “round window membrane,” he points out, is protected by the earlids that shape out the crocodile’s head.  Likewise, Montefeltro, Andrade and Larsson in 2106 pursued a comparative study (J of Anatomy 2016) in multiple species in the crocodilian group in which they investigate the “Large meatal chamber concealed by a pair of muscular earlids that shape a large air-filled middle ear chamber.”

Earlids as muscular tools, protective of excellent hearing: I didn’t know that I secretly wanted to be a crocodile.

Or maybe I already am.

Let me back up. One of the other commonalities of the “earlid” discussion is the notion that the hearing-impaired might have the human equivalent in their hearing aid devices (for example, Myers 2000, p. 13). I know how that works from my sister (who is legally deaf). She used to talk about reaching up to click off all the classroom noise during exams. (She may also have confessed to clicking off a scolding or two as well, ahem.) She wound up valedictorian, so there might be some use to that strategy.

But I’m not that person. Rather, I have the Schafer form of “earlid,” that focused intensity that slams shut the world around us. I “go deaf to the world” when reading a particularly good novel, for instance (T. Kingfisher, George Eliot, Nicola Griffith, Kelly Barnhill, Casual Farmer, Jane Austen, S.A. Chakraborty…. And whatever else floats past my event horizon on the book front). The same zoning out practice happens when I pick up my scholarly projects. I have “come to” with (adult) children standing patiently in front of me holding paper signs saying “Mom?” (Okay, it was funny, but it happened more than once, eek).

The interesting thing about this kind of concentration is that I do obviously process sound at some level. “Were you talking to me?” and “Was that a siren?” and “Do we need to take cover from the storm?” are a few of the questions I’ve had on my lips as I’ve emerged from my stupor.

The sound was there. My brain took it in. But the slammed-down wall of concentration didn’t let any of those sounds penetrate my concentration. The earlids of the mind are clearly located somewhere between one’s ear drum and one’s consciousness, and they work even better than eyelids, which leak light. The time delay for even urgent sounds to penetrate can be 90 seconds or so -- all my sound questions are justifiably phrased in the past tense. A flash of lightning can grab me out of the concentration space; the rumble of thunder is less likely to do so.

This experience of closed earlids is, at least for me, separable from flow. Flow can happen with or without the earlids closed. I frequently encounter flow while on the trail, for instance, but part of that flow is processing the forest sounds and leaning into the acoustics of the landscape. Flow is also enjoyable in music – whether I’m listening to a recording or attending a concert, following a score or recreating the music in my head. There are lots of details of the work to which I am listening coming in on that emotional-analytical channel, but I can do it with earlids open or earlids closed. More often, music is an earlids open kind of experience for me; I am in the music but I am reachable (sometimes frustratingly so – sorry, family!).

But sometimes the music is earlids closed; only the music is in the brain’s consciousness, and it is all-consuming, fully occupying all attention and setting up for the delivery of those perfect moments that are the “reason” for the passage, the movement, the symphony as a whole; the coloratura run, the swell on the held note, the fade into ineffable beauty.

Earlids closed happens most naturally with music I know and love, but it can sometimes happen with music I am hearing for the first time, and even with music I don’t like. Working on developing an interpretive understanding of the music seems one trigger; following the “idiom” of the music as if it were another dialect and I was straining to follow its vocabulary is another. Both include an intellectual component, so maybe that’s part of the earlid mechanism – a left-brain kind of processing. And maybe there’s an intellectual component to loving that Brahms moment too: I am following the music in the moment, but also projecting the familiar music’s future, so that I am having a multi-temporal appreciation of the particular moment, and surely that must have a left-brain “understanding” component as well as the right-brain “O what beauty!” element.

Bringing it back to that book-reading, I suspect that there’s both an element of analytical and appreciative activity that plays into the earlid function. I follow the story, imagine its world, and revel in its revelations. Busy brain, busy brain, no room for distracting thing like conversations about what we should do for dinner or whether the computers should be unplugged in advance of the storm. The emergency isn’t here yet; my brain has its earlids tightly closed.

These three cases, then, seem to suggest that flow – that highest form of concentration – is distinct from the earlid function. Sometimes flow is *about* sound, either at large (hiking) or in selective part (music). Sometimes earlids are open (hiking and music) and sometimes they are closed (music and some of the best reading). I can read in a flow state that is interruptable (if with some irritation), or in a flow state that is not, except through touch or patience. The earlids are a different KIND of concentration from “flow,” I suspect, and bicameral in its function. (I’m betting it involves both left and right brain – and those both as cause of earlid clamping and as effect.)                       

What am I arguing? I believe that like a crocodile swimming in the ocean, or like my sister shutting off her devices, my brain can use its muscles to shut out the unnecessary distractions.

Whether my family agrees with my brain’s judgment about what qualifies as “unnecessary” (and thus when my earlids can be shut) is another question entirely!

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Soundscape Readings on Earlids:

• McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001) – on earlids, see p. 111
• Myers, David G. A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss (2000) - on earlids, p. 13.
  
• Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape (1977/r1994) – see p. 11 on earlids.

Crocodylians and their Earlids, a small sampling:

• Bierman, H. S., Thornton, J. L., Jones, H. G., Koka, K., Young, B. A., Brandt, C., Christensen-Dalsgaard, J., Carr, C. E., & Tollin, D. J. “Biophysics of directional hearing in the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).” The Journal of Experimental Biology, 217.7 (2014): 1094. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.092866.
• Montefeltro, F. C., Andrade, D. V., & E. Larsson, H. C. “The evolution of the meatal chamber in crocodyliforms.” Journal of Anatomy, 228.5 (2016): 838-863. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.12439
• Wever, E. G. “Hearing in crocodilia.” Protocols of the National Academy of Science, 68.7, (1971): 1498–1500.

 

Manipulations of reality’s sounds: Drever on Soundscape Composition (11/6/24)

A Venn diagram of soundscape and ethnography with interpretation & soundscape compositions in the middle

Drever, John Levack. “Soundscape composition: the convergence of ethnography and acousmatic music.” Organised Sound, 7 ((2002): 21-27. doi:10.1017/S1355771802001048 

Thinking about nature films and their scores and sounds reminded me of the Drever article from 2002, where he makes the case that ethnography and soundscape composition for a kind of Venn diagram. Okay, okay, that’s reductive, but memory latches on to simple solutions. 

Soundscape composition, in brief, uses noises from nature as a significant element in the compositional palette, manipulating recorded sounds or their electronically-generated equivalents to evoke a sense of place – in situ (as with sound-sculpture or sound installation) or as a re-creation or reminder of a place, real or imagined. (Hildegard Westerkamp’s "Kits Beach Soundwalk" (1989) interlays natural sounds with an interpretive text, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg96nU6ltLk). 

Drever wants us to think about Soundscape composition as more than just sonic tourism. Since he believes that a significant element of soundscape is “the way it is perceived and understood by an individual or by a society,” he’s interested in drawing out that sense of meaning. 

As a result, to qualify as “good” (my label) soundscape music, soundscape must be the driver at both the deep and the surface level of the composition. That is, it’s not enough to signal the twittering of birds, but there needs to be a form-based intentionality to how the environment intersects with its musical response. Best, he says, is when the work enhances our understanding of the world. 

The composer must interpret and represent sounds in ways that respect the original environment--and also (he suggests) the original listeners' experiences. Drawing on Steven Feld’s 1994 study of Papau New Guinea and that society’s vocal mimicry of bird song as communication, he argues that since both ethnography and soundscape thinking approach their environment from the inside, a compositional response might be a useful representation of an ethnographer’s understanding of sound in a culture. Privileging that original meaning means that interpretation needs as much attention as aesthetics in the finished work. 

Drever’s argument has been widely cited, but I was surprised on this reading that it didn’t help me much with my own thinking. Perhaps the arguments from 20 years ago have simply become commonplace. Of course I respect and want to understand the meanings the nuns of Thalbach (in Bregenz) assigned to the sounds that they heard. The chronicle account (in Ch 28) of the windstorm that trapped sister Margretha Schmidin as she was crossing the bridge on a wagon, and her three-fold recitation of the rosary as thanksgiving for her rescue when the wagon tipped draws attention both to nature and to prayer as ambient experiences. The noise and bluster, the confrontation with the cart-driving farmer and his wife, the articulated plea before the crossing and the thanksgiving prayers afterwards: each bead in her story (as told by the Chroniclist) is situated in a multisensory world. But I am not drawn to reconstruction in a compositionally creative sense; I’m not sure how that work would advance my understanding in any meaningful way. I suppose that’s because I carry the sounds of a storm, or a plea, or a prayer in my head, and create that internal soundtrack in the imagined recreation as I read (and then remember). I can open a YouTube tab and sample such things if I need; and my readers can too. 

So my take-away is: I think we may have moved beyond that moment as our soundworld has shifted so strongly to that digitally archived space, and I think I might have more luck with sound and memory than sound and composition. But I suspect that we had to read cases like Drever’s for thinking interpretively about soundscapes before we could get to a place where they are perhaps a given of our discussion.

It’s not time travel: sound modeling of 1622 St Paul’s (10/31/24)

1625 Woodcut of St Paul's (from Wall 2014)

Wall, John. “Recovering Lost Acoustic Spaces: St. Paul's Cathedral and Paul's Churchyard in 1622.” Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 3.3 (2014). https://www.digitalstudies.org/article/id/7245/

Sound modeling offers powerful insights about the past, but it’s not time travel. We can tell important things about our past and query our assumptions about it, but we never get to recreate an exact experience of what “really” happened. 

The NEH-funded Virtual Paul’s Cross project focuses on sermons as performance by examining sound as a component of the sermon experience. Using architectural modeling and acoustic simulation, they take a specific sermon from November 5th, 1622 – delivered by John Donne – and explore its sound signature. 

One of the key questions is “the audibility of a sermon delivered without amplification in a large open space for people positioned at different places in the crowd” – a question interesting for my own work on graveside ceremonies. Relying on a full team (“architects, visual and acoustic modellers, linguists, actors, recording engineers, and historians and literary scholars”) they put together a simulation – the fun part of scholarly productivity! http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu

Their assessment of the world of John Donne comes with important caveats: 

The purpose of digital modelling is not to give direct access to a world that is forever lost to us, but to enable us to organise and experience in new ways the data that come to us from the past and to evaluate from new perspectives both the scope and limitations of our understanding of that data. The outcome of a project using digital modelling is not an exercise in time travel… They are instead constructions based on interpretations of existing data 

That distance from the experience is one I have thought about as I have climbed hills surrounding churches of interest for my own work; without the pastoral provisions of the 15th century, how much even of topographically-shaped work is reflective (a carefully chosen pun!) of the soundworld my communities might have experienced? Since pasture and forest and field each have their own acoustic signature, the modern mix and familiar pathways of a 21st century hiker cannot replicate the historical past. But perhaps there are elements that DO point towards experience – rounding the corner with that glacially-deposited boulder is going to change the church-bell ring. 

In short, I agree with the authors that we use these replicated experiences “to reconceptualise the subject of our study, re-evaluate the usefulness of our existing approaches, and reconsider the kinds of questions we bring to the discussion.” Models help us think better. 

 (And I could use help thinking, for sure!) 

The St Paul’s team has the benefit of a treasure-trove of visual evidence, largely absent for those of us working at the level of town or country, and the authors have paid careful attention to the relative authority of various evidence types. And, since architecture has implied acoustics, they can move from visual parameters to acoustic models. Here, they follow Vorlander (2009), Longair and Boren (2010), and, expecially, Howard and Moretti (2010) on early modern church practices. 

As they note, large crowds, banners, and tapestries on festive occasions increased acoustic absorption. The practices of religion shaped the acoustics of religion, with impacts both on reverb and on musical clarity. 

After explaining why they chose their space-- the north east corner of the churchyard – the authors explain the ambient noises under consideration and the crowd sizes that they used in their modeling. 

They also give details about the kinds of things that the models “do” for them. They ask: What coheres (and what does not)? What assumptions are WE bringing to our experience? In part, the model becomes a useful filter for understanding our data – and even more importantly, its limits. 

One thing I’m noting just for my future attention: the authors distinguish between “representative rather than specific examples” – the absence of a detailed diary entry means that the generic category supplies information for the site that would not be available from the data inherent to the site itself. Thus, the ambient noise is representative randomly occurring sounds. (A background of silence would obviously have been inauthentic.) 

The discussion of their visual modeling is definitely worth a read https://www.digitalstudies.org/article/id/7245/, but here I’m just going to mention a few things about their sound model: 

1. an accurate model depends on 3 things; the space’s dimensions, the various disrupting forms (“geometric forms”) that are present there, and the materials of which they’re made 
2. in particular, they had to consider the materials of the space: stone, wood, plaster, brick, dirt, and the bodies and clothing of the congregation. This matters in my graveyard ceremony discussions, since so many material goods are mentioned as part and parcel of the ceremony itself. 
3. their model revealed that sound reflections from the buildings SIGNIFICANTLY amplified the speech – it would still be audible 140 feet or more away, instead of dying out at the 96 ft mark. 
4. the ambient noise is, they estimate, 35 Db – far less than the 45 Db of the modern urban environment 
5. bell-based pauses probably have remnants in the text, since a before and after would be necessary to stitch the performance across the bell-peal hole. That’s a really interesting stylistic feature and probably applicable to other kinds of texts as well! 
6. One has to imagine the voice, but a strong and measured cadence would be most effective given crowd size (and public expectation) 

As we are less than a week out from the anniversary of the Gunpowder Day sermon, I thought now a good time to review the process that the group took to a plausible reconstruction of Donne’s sermon as planned. 

But there’s one last twist to share: As every good hiker knows, outdoor delivery of program is beholden to the weather gods, and they did not smile on that Tuesday back in 1622. After all the planning (and reconstruction), that particular sermon had to be moved indoors as the storms rolled through. And that’s the kind of thing that REALLY mucks with your model!

Scoring for Calm or for Excitement? Smalley et al. (2023) on choices of sound in digital nature experiences (10/25/24)

I’m lucky enough to live on a farm, so wandering around in nature is something that comes as a matter of course for me, but I’m interested in how “digital nature” fits into the modern soundscapes we inhabit, and came across the Smalley et al. article while looking for a different reference. It was an interesting read, so here’s my summary!

Great Egret in a Florida waterway

Alexander J. Smalley et al., “Soundscapes, music, and memories: Exploring the factors that influence emotional responses to virtual nature content,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 89 (2023): #102060, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1787215/FULLTEXT01.pdf

The idea of visiting nature in a digital environment is popular, and was doubly so during the period of shelter-at-home recommendations during the first outbreak of the COVID pandemic. During that time, the authors of Smalley et al.’s “Soundscapes, music, and memories” got the idea of testing how the digital delivery of nature was actually working in terms of its emotional deliverables: cognitive reset, restorative potential calm, excitement, and awe. (They cite Kaplan & Kaplan 1989 on attention restoration theory, and Ulrich et al. 1991 on stress recovery theory as influences on their thinking). They had n=7636 participants, so provide a robust quantitative assessment of the field.

They noted that while we’ve done a lot of work to understand how viewing nature works, we’ve done less to understand how hearing such nature-scapes works in that digitally mediated environment, and they developed a clever plan to test the parameters that matter, using four different audio setups: silence, only music, only nature sounds, and a combination of music and nature sounds.

Since most documentaries have historically relied on big bold orchestral scores, they commissioned a “wall-of-sound” score (à la Hans Zimmer) to accompany their 3-minute digitally-generated nature scene, and (in collaboration with BBC Soundscapes for Wellbeing) measured the video’s impact with and without natural sounds layered in. (The natural sounds included things like bird song, water sounds, and the like.)

They were also interested in memory and its intersection with “affective outcomes triggered by digital nature content,” but noted that nostalgia (more particularly), being so often tied to specific musical cues, may not have been operational, given the newly generated score.

They found that:

The inclusion of music in our scene was associated with greater feelings of excitement (where it was the highest rated condition for this outcome), lower levels of calmness, and no significant change in restorative potential, awe, or nostalgia, compared to the silent control.

Music, in other words, is doing something, but it is not actually doing the restorative work of nature. To create excitement, we may be seeing “rhythmic entrainment” – the body responding to the upbeat rhythms of the music – and/or “emotional contagion,” in which the listener identifies with “the energy and excitement expressed by the music.”

But, since music meets only one of the positive parameters that “nature videos” can head for, the authors emphasize “the importance of multi-sensory depictions of nature.” Restoration and reset, and even awe at the beauty of the world, are supported by the hearing of the sounds that surround it.

My take-away is that video with nature sounds is the best choice if you’re trying to invoke a state of calm and get ready for another round of writing (ha!), but nature with music is better if you need that energy boost to clean the house.