Notes on “Pump Up The Bass: Rhythm, Cars and Auditory Scaffolding” by social theorist and sound person Brandon LaBelle.
LaBelle defines auditory scaffolding as the utilisation of music and sound to extend the self to the environment. In this sense, music from a loudspeaker or phone in public space is a mark of one’s culture and territory. For many marginalised groups sound is a function to reclaim power, to “reclaim the right to the street.” LaBelle 2015. LaBelle focuses on Mexican American culture in Los Angeles, and how the car with it’s sound capabilties became a medium “for the transformation of impoverishment and ostracisation into an emancipatory aesthetics.” Playing hip hop and bass music through the car speakers is a personalisation of the space of marginalised people, and an expression of that personalisation to the public. I feel encouraged by LaBelle’s research of a marginalised and non-western culture as a transformer in sonic behaviours and cultures. It can be a signifier of Sound Arts moving beyond a eurocentric canon. The discussion of noise as power for both the oppressed and the oppressors and beyond is a step past Murray Schaeffer’s yearning towards “quiet” and “natural” sounds in the soundscape. Who are we to request quiet?
Rhythm is a form of auditory latching. How do rhythms or energy patterns in urban space reveal power relations? “The surface of the world takes on significance when aligned with notions of drumming and auditory latching and the forces of cultures on the move, for one may understand the textures, objects, features and architectures of surrounding space as intrinsically meaningful according to how they are appropriated, put to use and utilised not only by their assigned function but also by their elasticity, malleability and resonance; or according to how they come to resist such appropriation: the world is a materiality in which locating the self is defined by a rhythmic potentiality.” LaBelle 2015. Suddenly architecture becomes not only the buildings themselves, but as the life between buildings.
Peronalised listening is a way for the self to manage everyday life. Personal listening devices like headphones are “private structures to latch on to, setting the pace to one’s daily actions, and giving personalised structure to the rhythms imposed by existing architectures and social spaces.”
Speech is also a form of auditory scaffolding. Not only does meaning exist in the words being communicated. Speech can be seen as “vibratory connection”. Speech is fleshy. The body gives itself meaning through vocalisation.