Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/121
2013
464
Introduction: Sampling Sound Studies in German Studies
121
2013
David Imhoof
Joy H. Calico
cg4640325
Introduction: Sampling Sound Studies in German Studies DAVID IMHOOF / JOY H. CALICO SUSQUEHANNA UNIVERSITY / VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY The development of Sound Studies has been rather quiet. Under this heading scholars across the western world have, especially over the last fifteen years or so, created institutes, founded journals, begun university programs, and written numerous books and articles, although that may be news to many people who work in the humanities and social sciences. Sound Studies, as the present issue demonstrates, brings together voices from various disciplines, expanding what is really more of a field with some common interests than a distinct discipline. The goal of this collection is not to define Sound Studies, much less give a complete rendering of its scope. Instead, we offer a sample of the breadth and development of this growing interdisciplinary field, as it relates to (chiefly modern) German Studies. Some of the scholars writing here might not have started their work believing they were working in Sound Studies but have found that analyzing phenomena through sound helps them draw valuable conclusions about the people, ideas, and events they study. Scholars have tried to define Sound Studies almost inevitably in the subjunctive, recognizing that definitions often limit more than they illuminate. Jonathan Sterne in 2003 laid out one broad perspective: «Sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival. By analyzing both sonic practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, it redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world.» He trumpeted cross-disciplinary pollination, arguing that most scholars in this field «are also something else: historians, philosophers, musicologists, anthropologists, literary critics, art historians, geographers, or residents of one of the many other postwar ‹studies› fields - long list here.» (Audible Past 2 - 3). This description fits our contributors too. The strength of Sound Studies, and indeed the «studies» model of scholarship generally (e. g., Film, German, Gender, American Studies, etc.), is that it draws on all of these other established traditions. That approach seems to work best when we recognize and share the assumptions in our disciplinary backgrounds. If anything holds the present group of collected essays together (and perhaps Sound Studies generally), it is the dual belief that (a) studying sound can tell us much about human behavior and (b) we can do that best by learning from other disciplines to ask different questions. Sound Studies grows from scholars’ increasing attention to the role of the senses generally. Already by the end of the twentieth century, we could speak of a «visual turn» in many humanistic and social science areas of inquiry (Boehm; Mitchell 1986, 1994). Scholars have also begun to investigate smell and touch, and even the relationship between senses (Classen 1994, 2012; M. Smith 2008; Howes; Toner). 1 Others have concomitantly pointed out the importance of mapping and spatial relations (Feld and Basso; Cresswell; Presner). While a number of writers have defined Sound Studies partly as a corrective to the modern privileging of visual perception (Schaffer; Sterne 2003), Mark Smith, one of the pioneers of sound and sensory history, encourages us to take a broader view. He locates sound studies within a larger enterprise, stretching back to Annales social scientists, that ultimately seeks to explain how people experience and give meaning to everyday life (M. Smith 2007, 2014). Such motives, rather than demarcation of fields or disciplines, animate this collection. Multidisciplinary work - scholars’ recognition that unique disciplinary perspectives collectively improve our ability to learn from acoustic experience - define Sound Studies, as the examples assembled here demonstrate. Sound Studies has also helped us understand the different ways both natural and recorded sound have functioned in the modern world. Early works by scholars of music, literature, history, and philosophy examined both kinds of sound (Feld; Chion; Corbin; Altman; B. Smith; Thompson 2002, 2004). What follows continues to attend to all manner of sound - natural, amplified, and recorded, sounds real and imagined, sound heard with others and alone in one’s head. The essays here all address the issue of human reaction to sound. While some sound studies focus exclusively on sound itself, the present essays’ focus missing a preposition: «human interaction with and response to» reflect the authors’ humanistic and social science orientations. The editors of this collection believe that sound, and thus Sound Studies, includes all sonic phenomena: noise, music, and everything in between. The German Studies Association Network for Music and Sound Studies, whose panels first brought together the authors featured in this volume, works under the assumption that music and sound people, who have not always worked together, have plenty to learn from each other. Both music and noise have played important roles in modern Germany (Applegate; Feiereisen and Hill). For instance, Nora Alter and Lutz Koepnick’s 2004 collection, Sound Matters, an early expression of Sound Studies in German Studies, offers 326 David Imhoof / Joy H. Calico scholars of the German-speaking world a rich vehicle for considering the implications of modern sound, something they argue «allowed embodied subjects to inhabit highly incongruent realties at once» and even forge a modern community (14). And though Sound Studies includes work from and about many places in the world, we can identify important intellectual antecedents in the Germanspeaking world. Benjamin Steege, an historian of music theory and another Sound Studies fellow traveler, identifies already in the work of nineteenthcentury physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz a modern, multivalent understanding of sound. In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin argued forcefully that modern reproducible culture could likewise disorient people, either reinforcing conservative politics or suggesting radical, progressive ideas. More recently literary scholar and media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s post-hermeneutical focus on technology’s autonomy and discourse has made his work a particularly valuable touchstone for sound studies. Just as Helmholtz identified sound as an object to be studied, Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme 1800/ 1900 (1985) helped develop the concept of language as writing, something created as much by technology as by individual authors. Kittler’s media determinism, further expanded in his 1986 Grammophon Film Typewriter, may have its limits, but his emphasis on analogue, electro-magnetic, and digital sound storage especially inspires scholars who use recorded sound as their object or vehicle for study. 2 The essays assembled here share some common themes. First, the fact that their authors come from history, literature, film studies, and ethnomusicology reflects the multidisciplinary nature of Sound Studies. Perhaps more importantly, they often use one discipline to interrogate another. A Germanist writes about acoustics; an historian analyzes musical performance; a literature specialist studies political history. In each case the unique experience of sound serves as the medium to facilitate this cross-disciplinary work. Next, all of the essays show how sound has defined Germans’ experience and understanding of space, what Steven Feld calls acoustemology (Feld 1996). Daniel Morat’s «Sounding Out Urban Space: Berlin Street Music Around 1900» explains the way conflicts about street performances delineated private vs. public space and notions of class. In «Listening to the Law: Auditory Disruptions in Der Process,» Tyler Whitney details characters’ experience of sound in their heads and in various spaces to reveal the modern, dystopian elements of Kafka’s novel. Jonathan Wipplinger expands the space and even memory of pre-World War I Berlin cafes by studying the performances and recordings of band leaders in «Eccentric Modernism: Or, George Grocz’s Gramophone Goes Meschugge.» Ted Rippey in 327 Introduction: Sampling Sound Studies in German Studies «Klangbild and Interwar Media» introduces us to a forgotten concept in order to explain a range of ways that interwar writers placed themselves in multi-media-defined spaces. Florence Feiereisen’s «They Tried to Divide the Sky: Listening to Cold War Berlin» uses sounds - sonic propaganda, rumbling trains, rock concerts - to show how Berliners experienced Cold War division. And Alison Furlong argues in «Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues» that «blues masses» in East German churches created a new and powerful community. Some of the authors, especially Morat, Wippinger, and Rippey, make clear that sound often mattered when it was consumed as modern mass culture. Almost all the essays grapple with the particularly modern concern about non-natural sound - electronic, amplified, or recorded. The subjects studied here see sound as a problem, solution, or opportunity, but above all as a hallmark of modern life. The analyses here all happen to be historical. Certainly many sound studies address today’s sounds and experiences. But the fact that these six scholars use a variety of sources, from actual recordings to descriptions to literary imaginings, in order to explicate Germans’ sonic experiences in the past indicates that the ephemeral nature of sound need not prevent our studying it. Indeed the fleeting nature and limited number of sound sources (especially from the past) encourages these scholars to connect listening directly to other experiences or practices. Feiereisen’s analysis of the aural Cold War, for example, depends upon the political reality of a militarily divided space, while simultaneously helping to explain Berliners’ understanding of that space. Rippey too links his argument about the development of the Klangbild to political changes in interwar Germany. Morat’s piece pairs analyses of sound and class. And Wipplinger draws from aesthetic assumptions about modernism, even as he uses sound to posit a new understanding of that very concept. Together these essays thus explore a number of issues that have animated Sound Studies since its inception. In an ambitious summation of sound studies in his 2012 The Sound Studies Reader, Jonathan Sterne maintains that «the current generation of sound studies work is defined by its conjecture.» (10) Especially by considering the fluid boundaries between sound, music, and noise in German contexts, the six essays that follow offer some riffs on how the field of sound studies continues to develop. 328 David Imhoof / Joy H. Calico Notes 1 On the impact of the «sensory turn» in art history specifically, see https: / / arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/ 2012/ 12/ lauwrens.pdf (accessed 13 August 2015). Current neuroscience has also focused lately on sound and sensory reception; see for example a recent symposium at the Vanderbilt Brain Institute on the brain and music at https: / / medschool.vanderbilt.edu/ brain-institute/ news-events/ music-mind-symposium (accessed 13 August 2015). A 2014 forum in German History (32.2) on the senses featured four scholars, including Daniel Morat, whose work appears in this issue. 2 See also the German Studies Review forum on Kittler’s legacy in the February 2015 issue (38.1). Works Cited Alter, Nora, and Lutz Koepnick, eds. Sound Matters. New York: Berghahn, 2004. Applegate, Celia. «What Is German Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of the Nation.» German Studies Review 15 (1992): 21 - 32. Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. «The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.» Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217 - 52. Boehm, Gottfried, ed. Was ist ein Bild? Munich: Fink, 1994. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Champagne: U of Illinois P, 2012. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synott. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge, 1994. Corbin, Alain. Sound and Meaning in the Village Bells. Trans. Martin Thom. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Feiereisen, Florence, and Alexendra Merley Hill, eds. Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century: An Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Feld, Steven. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982. Feld, Steven, and Keith H. Basso, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research P, 1996. Howes, David, ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Cultural Reader. New York: Berg, 2005. Kittler, Friedrich. Aufschreibesysteme 1800/ 1900. Munich: Fink, 1985. —. Grammophon Film Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkman & Bose, 1986. Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 329 Introduction: Sampling Sound Studies in German Studies —. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Presner, Todd, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano. HyperCities: Thick Mapping of the Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014. Schaffer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994. Smith, Bruce. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending the O-Factor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Smith, Mark M. Sensory History. Oxford: Berg, 2007. —. «Futures of Hearing Pasts.» Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19thand 20th-Century Europe. Ed. Daniel Morat. New York: Berghahn, 2014. 13 - 22. Smith, Mark M., ed. Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Steege, Benjamin. Helmhotz and the Modern Listener. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. —. The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2012. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900 - 1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. —. «Wiring the World: Acoustical Engineers and the Empire of Sound in the Motion Picture Industry, 1927 - 1930.» Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Ed. Viet Erlmann. New York: Berg, 2004. 191 - 209. Toner, Jerry, et. al., eds. A Cultural History of the Senses. 6 vols. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 330 David Imhoof / Joy H. Calico
