Sonic Sensibilities: Composing Stories of the Past Through Sound
Given the relationship between sound, space, and artistic expression, it is not surprising that geospatial art-creation has expanded beyond geovisualization into new sonic registers. The shift has been a long time coming as the spatial humanities work to make space for more-than-visual methods and knowledges. This is a particular concern of geographers who advocate for listening as a central way of knowing and being in the world, despite the silencing of sound-based knowledges. What does it mean to incorporate sound and listening into geo-spatial art practices? What are the geotechnologies of listening?
In their work on listening geographies, Gallagher, Kanngieser, and Prior (2016) highlight the need for re-sounding space:
As a discipline addressing the earth in all its diversity, geography needs to develop broader sonic sensibilities. Every space and place sounds and resounds, every living body and being vibrates, and every kind of material, object and surface has acoustic properties. Conceiving of listening in a narrowly anthropocentric way is wholly inadequate for understanding this profoundly polyphonic world. (620)
The authors list several ways a sonic sensibility might enhance – and be enhanced by – geospatial practices. These include “mapping landscapes, charting animal populations, understanding social configurations, investigating technologies of warfare and governance, monitoring earthquakes” to name only a few (631). In what follows, we discuss two projects that lend a sonic ear to past environments, with a focus on the sonification of historical research.
Re-sounding Global Warming
Although less common than visualization, an increasingly explored form of geospatial art-science collaboration is the sonificationof historical and scientific data in digital and material ways. In a previous module, for example, we highlighted “A Song for Our Warming Planet” (an interdisciplinary project out of University of Minnesota), which turns 135 years of thermometer measurements into music as another way to “describe the pace and the place of global warming.” This piece has also led to other compositions like “Planetary Bands: Warming World,” a string quartet with instruments that represent different parts of the northern hemisphere, with pitch being tuned to the average annual temperature of a given region. As Daniel Crawford, who co-created the project with geographer Scott St. George, explains, music enables a more visceral encounter with climate and geospatial data:
Listening to the violin climb almost the entire range of the instrument is incredibly effective at illustrating the magnitude of change — particularly in the Arctic which has warmed more than any other part of the planet. (University of Minnesota, 2015)
Although there are many forms of “soundmapping,” sonification projects like the ones above offer alternative ways of mapping the historical geographies of climate change through music, rather than more traditional, visual maps. This does not mean one is necessarily more appropriate or effective than the other; indeed, these multi-sensory stories of environmental change often converge through the multi-media capacities of GIS-based storymapping. However, a key point is to consider what a shift toward the soundworld might offer to future digital spatial humanities research. In the next example, we show how one historical researcher used digital data sonification to create “songs” of a river’s lesser-known histories.
“Songs of the Ottawa” by Cristina Wood
Another example of “sensing” environmental history through auditory space comes from Cristina Wood’s “Songs of the Ottawa,” which she describes on her project website as an “experiment in the digital data sonification of the Ottawa River’s pasts between 1880-1980” (Wood, 2019).
Using archival materials such as hydrometric data, historical maps, and newspapers, among other sources, Wood created sonic stories that re-sounded socio-economic, environmental, and historical processes about the river, including dredging and sawdust pollution from the lumber trade, major flood events, river flows, tourism and recreation, and fish mobilities. Beyond telling different histories of the river, the project also harnesses the affective properties of sound to tell new stories about the past, or to share old stories in new ways, to new audiences. In the digital context, the affective, resonant qualities of sound also challenge the meanings of “data.” As Wood explains,
This project asks readers and listeners to hear uncanny, affective pasts and consider the ways in which storytellers can “de-form” and “re-form” data and sources.
Of course, using a computer to turn numerical data into a “Musical Instrument Digital Interface” (using MIDITime, a library developed for Python), also reimagines who – or what – can be a composer. Similar to a written composition, which provides notations and aesthetic direction, making the code accessible for other researchers also provides insight into how digital data sonification of historical information was achieved, while also encouraging experimentation and improvisation for future digital “compositions.”
Please consider visiting the website to hear the many “songs of Ottawa” that came out of this ambitious project – from environmental histories of the riverbed over the course of a century to boat traffic schedules on a particular week in 1912. Then, begin to imagine other ways of composing stories that might be possible through geospatial sound-creation.