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Richard Phoenix is self-described as a music facilitator and primarily works with people with learning disabilities. He began his lecture by fleshing out some issues of language, for example, that ‘disabled person’ can be more appropriate than ‘person with a disability‘. ‘Disabled‘ insinuates that the person is disabled by the world around them – the design is not universal – real people have been forgotten in the design process. An architect had a certain image of a person… When we design or produce something, we manifest our image of a person as the user. When we are not in contact with disabled people, we forget these people as potential users of our designs.

We may be in a constant participatory design mode of the spaces we inhabit. Beyond the architect we must ask about the silence in the room: who is not here?

The diversity campaigns have yet to include people with learning disabilities.

Language can be exclusive. Richard Phoenix gave the word pedagogy as an example. We could often use the words teaching and learning instead and they are more widely understood. So why would we use the word pedagogy? Do we intend to exclude with our behaviour? The academic has an inner child that was misunderstood and hurt, a degree of seperation is necessary!

A part of my narrative for being queer goes something like this: I was rejected from the world, pushed to the peripheral; and I constantly seek an outsider position to maintain my understanding of myself. The attention and hate that I recieved as a child has been sculpted into a distrust and skepticism. The bitter air of rejection gives me access into queer community power stations where we convert the struggle into power, self awareness and body work.

Just like the academic can manifest their pain into an exclusive intellectualism, the queer can liberate themselves in spaces free from hate and those social inhibitions such as sobriety. Richard Phoenix makes a point in his manifesto “DIY As Priviledge” that the ability to be part of outsider spaces is a priviledge; that the ability to reject mainstream society is based on an ability to be independent. Beyond class, race, gender and sexuality, independence defined by leisure time, cultural capital and abilties is also affected by neurodivergent and disabled people. Some people can not be independent because of their needs. I guess, as we liberate ourselves, we could think of those left behind in the miserable pool of normativity, neither in nor out.

How can we help remove barriers? Be patient, and listen. The social model of disability is that the society, environment and culture creates barriers. A social barrier reflects the way we think: examination of the barrier includes self-reflection. “Using privilege to dismantle privilege, one of the best ways to use your voice is to amplify voices that aren’t being heard”. Be patient and listen, reflect, amplify. Put oneself into uncomfortable situations. As we come across difference we wonder, why now and not before? The unpeeling of the plastic layers is a slow unending process.

I’m thinking of the phrase: “Liberate us so we can liberate you.”

The bianzhong is an ancient Chinese instrument consisting of bronze bells to be played melodically. In 1978 a set of bells were unearthed in the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng. They were made in 433BC. The bells were placed in the tomb to be unplayed, silent, hidden. This use of an acoustic instrument resonates with contemporary sound works. The symbolism of silence is frequent in ancient Chinese culture.

In 800AD there lived Han-Shan and Shih-Te, two hermits living in the T’ien-t’ai Mountains of Chekiang Province, in Eastern China. They were reclusive radicals indulging in the joys of living, with a mind of Taoism. Ascetic, zen, metaphysical exploration, immersed in nature… Hundreds of poems were found carved onto stones and trees and are associated with Han-Shan and Shih-Te. Even if they never existed they come to symbolise an aesthetic solitude that is fundamental to the poetry of zen. Interestingly Gary Snyder was one of the first to translate their poems into English, who is described as a a poet and an “environmental activist with anarchoprimitivist leanings.” And the two old anarchist mountain bums often wrote about sound and silence, and we see a long history of environmentalism in Sound Arts.

“Anarcho-primitivism is a political ideology that advocates a return to non-“civilized” ways of life through deindustrialization, abolition of the division of labor or specialization and abandonment of large-scale organization technologies. Anarcho-primitivists critique the origins and progress of the Industrial Revolution and industrial society. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence during the Neolithic Revolution gave rise to coercion, social alienation and social stratification.”

The mountain poets were in love with the natural world. Here is one of Han Shan’s poems.

Thirty years in this world, I wandered ten thousand miles, By rivers, buried deep in grass, In borderlands, where red dust flies. Tasted drugs, still not Immortal, Read books, wrote histories. Now I’m back at Cold Mountain, Head in the stream, cleanse my ears.

There is a sense of purity, beyond knowledge or drugs or searching for_. Just the sound of the stream, “cleanse my ears”, washing the human condition of an impurity. The primacy of sound in Chinese poetry has had global influence. In Snyder’s book “Regarding The Wave” he connects englightenment to hearing, sound waves as a way in, inspired by the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, Kuan Yin, who’s name translates to “regarding the sound waves.”

It appears that Taoism and Buddhism promote attention beyond the visual to include the sonic environment, and therefore sound in China has been listened to. Phonography is popular in China. It is a desciption of laws of the human speech, or sounds uttered by the organs of speech. Yao writes that Chinese phonography celebrate the domain of human affairs, the “non-utopian, the this-worldy, the social, the interpersonal, the personal, the bodily…” How wonderful! A celebration of the flawed humanity we engage from within, the noise that has spread, an admiration that doesn’t seem to match Western anarcho-primitivism, or Western phonography which apparently has embedded the conceptual dichotomy of man vs nature.

I’m curious about these relationships and a dysfunction: a poetry tradition acknowledging the beauty of natural sound, of nature and peace, hermitage, that has perhaps been interpreted in a Western audience as a utopia to return to, but current Chinese phonography is celebrating techno-urban human affairs. Snyder was friends with Keruoac and they tried their best to dissolve the ego to transcend to the top of the mountain. How the West struggles to interpret Eastern philosophy! Errors of translation?

How is Ancient China being interpreted, anywhere? It’s certainly mentioned throughout the article, Sound Art in China. David Toop doesn’t go back more than a few decades, and oat milk is everywhere now. Running forwards the West will grab anything. Running away?

I thought it was awful to only imagine China as something to compare/contrast to the “West”. But then I cannot approach it another way, there are barriers such as language and conditionment. I cannot get the West or China out of my head! I wonder does the technical process of applying nationhood to sound work?

A conversation between David Toop and Adam Parkinson in 2015.

“In the 1970s we called it “sound work,” which I prefer and still use.
One of the reasons for that was a very 1970s idea of aligning
yourself with a worker. We tried to detach ourselves from the art
world (which we were detached from whether we liked it or not) and
also from the music world.” (Toop)

“…sound art to me is problematic for… a number of reasons. One, because it is so closely associated with a
particular world and a particular economy – the art world – and there
are all sorts of reasons why that’s difficult. It puts a strong focus
on the creation of some kind of object…” (Toop)

A rejection of the art world and it’s economy is a rejection of the wider trends and systems that art fits into – consumerism, materialism, capitalism and so on. There is value in sound work being on the peripheral of a society. It maintains a critical viewpoint of the society, like an outsider. (I often imagine humans as pigs, then I am outside and they look ridiculous.) Toop suggests a mutual detatchment “(which we were detached from whether we liked it or not)“, from Sound workers wanting new ways to circulate their work, and from a long established Art world that doesn’t understand sonic practices/sound in art.

I am curious about “whether we liked it or not“. What if they did like it? I wonder if people want to maintain their position as an outsider, if they perhaps need the “mainstream” to prove their own unique character. In this belief of being seperate from the horrors of society we might forget to be self-critical. Deconditioning might be an infinite process and in radical thinking we forget our source, where we came from. As outsiders are we not still fertile with same harmful ideas and approaches to human and non-human, ready to repeat oppression clothed in a new aesthetic?

A quote from ‘Give Up Activism’ by Andrew X – “Revolutionary martyrdom goes together with the identification of some cause separate from one’s own life – an action against
capitalism which identifies capitalism as ‘out there’ in the
City is fundamentally mistaken – the real power of capital
is right here in our everyday lives – we re-create its power
every day because capital is not a thing but a social
relation between people (and hence classes) mediated
by things.”

In a way, Toop frames the art world as ‘out there’ in the same way revolutionaries sometimes talk about capitalism. But Toop and his cronies in the 1970s were constructing newness by changing the product-orientation of art, from making art to working on a process. As we claim a critical perspective we must also be constructing – making the world where we can practice our way of thinking.

Culture is like an ocean, radicalising, assimilating, swallowing itself, but we hope in this process there is progress? I appreciate Toop’s point about the process of art rather than an end goal, recognising the impossibility of an ending.

I listened to an interview with Francisco López at the Red Bull music academy that opened me to new ideas and resonated feelings I have about sound and reality. López is described as a sonicist, composer and bioligist. So I ask, what is sonicism?

In ‘Sonicism I: Against Instrumentalism’, academic Julian Todd writes “Sonicism holds that works are identical just in case they sound exactly alike.” To a sonicist, timbre holds more value in individuating a composition that the instrumentation or instrument used. To an instrumentalist, a piece is different when played with a different instrument, even if the pieces are sonically indistinguishable. To me it seems clear that a difference between sonicism and instrumentalism is the value of sound or sound source: a sonicist values the sound over the source of the sound which proposes a radically new way of seeing/hearing. In agreement, I would add that we make a presumption in considering what the source of the sound is… Does the sound not exist in the perception rather than the instrument ‘out there’? Sonicism is criticising the belief in an external reality being the fundamental or reality, which leads me to one of López’ philosophies behind his work.

López is interested in the sound of a composition. He proposes that a fictional piece aka compositon, can be a more real representation of experience than the material world. He is not interested in recreating the sounds of the material world but instead distorting/adjusting them creatively to reflect a personal reality, one that is subjective, emotional and being perceived. He calls this “the surprise and the unexpected.”

He says that a sound piece is “an open gate into a territory of exploration. It is the resonsibility of the listener to create within that terrain… The most fundamental act of creation when it comes to sound or music is not producing sound, it is listening to sound.” Wowee! A composition is a blank canvas for the listener to interact with and create… This ‘territory of exploration’ is the sound piece created by López. I think the soundscape of the material reality is also a ‘territory of exploration’ and there is constant creative value in our engagement with this world. An ephiphany I had in López’ philosophy is that is it difficult to distinguish the creative value between our perception of the ‘real world’ and art. Perhaps the border is conceptual and unnecessary, the real value or real world is actually in the perception, not in what is being percieved.

Hereby ends some confusion I had about my creative practice. A few months ago I started to hear the environmental soundscape as an artpiece. I became confused in the idea of <em>adding</em> to this soundscape with my music and sound because it already had total value. López’ philosophy makes me feel that the value is not in the materiality but in how it is percieved, so whatever the world is, a sound art composition or walking down a street listening to traffic, the value is applied in the perception. A unique value in created art or compositon is the expression of subjectivity can be shared with other humans.

López has concluded a momentary confusion by proposing new questions, and new confusions emerge. As I place the tips of my fingers on knowing, it is again refuted, I am again lost and unsure about the world.

04/10/21

Today we explored the meaning of Sound Arts. Questions like “what is Sound Arts?” were an instigator to explore ontology and in ontology we question existence and our categorical approach to reality… The lecture was a deconstruction of supposed truths, which I enjoyed since the absurd human world deserves criticism.

A term like Sound Arts can have different meanings to different people so we wonder how viable verabl communication is possible in a subjective reality? Again, exploring the term Sound Arts was a way to explore the wider reality that it’s linguistic and symbolistic values reside in, from a metaphysical perspective. In metaphysics we explore relationships between “mind” and “matter.”

Positionality affects how we experience the world. Our personal backgrounds and identities create a unique lens to absorb the external through our senses, and then percieve it. However, as Milo said, the existence of an objective external is a philosphical assumption. If positionality affects, what is it affecting?

Perhaps we can and will transcend identity to feel a real spiritual connection with other beings and lifeforms. Maybe beyond a conceptual reality all forms of life and matter blend into an ethereal oneness. Beyond identity, category and concept exists the glowing pool of universal conciousness. I like some new age music made by white men, but must we forgive the oppressors?

In the age of identity politics, we are aware that there is a use to categorising experience in the oppressive society. A translation of misery can encourage empathy and a willingness to make social change.

During the lecture, we used dualisms that can be useful to understand the world and even deconstruct other dualisms. I propose that a way to understand Sound Arts can be to seperate the descriptive terms sound arts or sonic arts, with the field of Sound Arts. sonic arts is self explanatory and encompasses any artform using sound. I believe the field of Sound Arts is different because of it’s cultural history, themes and community. It carries specific aesthetics and specific ways of seeing the world. sonic arts could be the empty audio track with a massive potentiality within a frequency and amplitude range. Sound Arts could be the exported audio track that is transient but sounds like itself at the moment of listening. 

The CD cover of Murmer – They Were Dreaming They Were Stones looks similiar to other Sound Arts CDs. It doesn’t look like the Now That’s What I Call Music! CDs. Now that’s what I call Sound Arts!