Sound Souvenirs

november 26, 2006.

All of my grandparents disappeared, as did my father. One by one they passed away, one after the other.
Already many, many years ago.

But with the exception of my father's father who died about a year before I was born, I have also been among them for a good part of my life. Which, of course, implies that I have heard them a good deal. The sounds of their voices for a long time were among the sounds that surrounded me. For most of them: almost daily. These sounds were an important part of the soundscape of my youth ...

But even though I did make a (modest) start with my 'recording habit' at the time that all of them were still alive, I do not remember ever having caught their voices on cassette or other tape.

And at times now I wonder: would I recognize these voices, were I to hear them again?

When thinking about this, it did come as a disappointment that I seemed to be unable to replay the sound of my father's voice before my mind's ear, no matter how hard I tried. Neither have I found it possible to 're-sound' the voice of my mother's father ...
On the other hand, I (think I) can remember pretty well - I can re-sound - both of my grandmothers' voices ... Is that because of the little phrases these women used to repeat a lot, and which came with a typical phrasing, and a distinctive rhythmic pattern and melodic curve, that now still enables me to 're-imagine-, to 're-play' their voices, their timbres ... their sound ... ?

It does seem so ...
And if only I could re-call some such phrases used by my father and grandfather, I'd surely be able to also re-call their sound ... ?

...
Would I recognize them were they to speak to me now? ...

'Sound Souvenirs' was the title of a one-day symposium that took place on friday november 10th in Maastricht ( * ), centered around reflections on sound, music and memory.

Music, memory ... of both we have an awful lot, but know little about ...

Several of the talks in Maastricht were about how the two are linked and knit together ... Music (melody, rhythm) is a powerful 'memorization tool'. We all know how much easier it is to retain a text when it is set to a beat: I can still faultlessly recite the beginning of Homer's Odyssey, in greek ( ** ), because at school our teacher made us chant that particular part, 'aloud and all together now', while he - a funny looking little man with a big balding head - would stamp along to the coercive beat of its meter, wildly waving his arms ... Remarkable, as I actually did forget pretty much all of the rest that he labored to teach us for five long years ...
And - like certain smells - for each (most) of us there are these certain musics that strongly evoke ('bring back', 'transport' us to) specific periods from our past. Often that will be because at the time we used to hear (though not necessarily listen to) that particular music a lot.
Especially pop(ular) songs appear to possess this 'beam me back up in time'-quality, which must be related to the fact that by their very nature and ways of distribution/consumption pop songs are played and sound extremely often during a relatively short period of time, while not having sounded before; and often will be played only incidentally again after.
That, of course, makes them perfect as candidate time-markers ...

Thinking more about the why of this so very strong effect on our memory of especially recorded music, it occurred to me that there is something very typical about a recording of a sound or music from the past, something it does not share with, for example, objects or photographs from that time. (But that it, arguably, somehow does share with that other major time-transporter: smell ...) That is: what re-sounds is identical to what sounded then, it is - in a very strong sense - absolutely the same. Which is not true of merely images, or even of objects from that time (that in general will have alter-ed, like our selves they have aged) ... While the recording does take 'time' to sound, it is as if the sounds themselves exist out of time: they are now, as they were then. Thus recorded sounds in this epoque strike me as the nearest one can get to preserving something cherished identically, in an un-alter-ed form; out of time, un-aging, as if existing in a 'perpetual now'.

Listening to a whole series, a collection of 'old songs', may be like leafing through a diary or an album of photographs, with each page of words read and images seen bringing along the ghosts of things, thoughts and thems that were back then ...

Nostalgia ?

The word was in the title of Michael Bull's lecture: Sound nostalgias: iPod culture and the rhythms of longing. In his talk he cited parts from interviews that he conducted (by email) with users of iPods, some of whom carry around with them their entire music collection, and sometimes refer to their using the pod as a 'time machine' ...
I heard/read similar stories before, and personally always found them difficult to relate to ...

That must be because listening to music in that particular way does not interest me. So why would I want to carry along 'all of my music in my pocket'? What for? Merely because I can? ... I also do not like listening to music in public spaces (some more about that in the earlier buddha machine entry). The two together are the main reason why I do not own an iPod or similar device ... (I did buy one for my son, though).
Even were I to be stationed for a long time in a faraway jungle, a desert or near one of our earth's poles (as was the case with one of Michael's interviewees) I would hardly want to bring along all of my music, all of my books ...
I do like to listen to music while driving a car (alone and long distance), though. But on those occasions I am happy to just pick a box of cassettes or CDs ... and not for a drive along memory lane, for that is not the way I want to listen to music. Even though at times also to me this happens, it is not an 'effect' that I am searching for ...
And, yes, were I sent to prison, off to war, or shipwreck on a desert island I'd like to be there just with a little, instead with all stuffed onto the drive of an iPod or something ...

I do understand though that for certain types/groups of (pop) music consumers - they'll often have their personal 'musical sound track' for each and every occasion - listening to music may work this way.
For the majority, though, the 'time trip' quality of songs will be limited to only a handful of tracks that they know from their (relative) youth, say from their mid teens till their late twenties.

In Holland, many of these will tune their radio between Christmas and New Year to the immensely popular 'Radio 2 Top 2000' emission, during which a - by public voting established - list of the 2000 'most popular songs' is broadcast. The program (on dutch public radio) was originally invented in 1999 to celebrate the turn of the millennium, but proved to be so successful, that its 'formula' got further developed. The 'top 2000' over the past eight years has become nothing short of a 'national (pop) music mass', with a still growing number of worshippers: for this year's list near to two million votes have been recorded ...
In a joint presentation the program's founding father Kees Toering sketched the top 2000's development and history, while media & culture researcher José van Dijck explained how and why this yearly national event has developed into a 'multimedia platform allowing people to connect their personal recollections to collective memory'. José has been going through the many, many messages left behind by top 2000 listeners in the forums that are part of the program's website. She found this to be a veritable treasure trove of song-related personal recollections and narratives. Maybe somewhat surprisingly, a great many of the narratives are of what José calls a technostalgic nature, that is, very much related to a specific (technological) means of listening to the song. (A particularly fine story that she mentioned was from someone recounting playing in their youth a particular record over and over again on a turntable that had no speakers attached to it; they listened to the music by putting their ears close to the pick up's needle ...)

And yes, in my guise of 'Terrible Tape Man', technostalgia is something that I indeed can relate to ...
(click the image to enlarge ... ;-) ...

José and her team will cooperate with Radio 2 in turning the collecting of these narratives into an archival project. Which is an excellent idea, I think. I have some doubts though about the form they have chosen for (re-)starting to harvest this potentially so fine and rich material ... participating in a 'writing contest' seems to me to be so very different from just jotting down spontaneously a couple of lines as part of an ongoing stream of forum messages ... Maybe I'm wrong, but something tells me that this is not the right way to proceed ...

...

In all of this, nothing yet was said about precisely how we memorize, about what it is that we re-call when we remember music, when we remember sound. Thinking about the music and the sounds one has heard in the course of a life time, and all of it that one remembers, it is tempting to look at your brain as some sort of a sound recorder.

But it is a curious kind of recorder ...

When I re-call a piece of music, I find that I may access it at different levels. First it is there for me to behold as 'a whole', as 'one piece', as 'one thing'. But I also may play it, and 'hear' it, in different degrees of 'fidelity', depending somewhat on effort and concentration ... This is a 'hearing' though that is quite different from that by ears, even though mostly I find it hardly less precise. When I imagine, for example, Jimmy Hendrix' Voodoo Chile or Erik Truffaz' Elegie I do know that I know the sound of Jimmy's guitar and that of Erik's trumpet in all of their performative finesse and timbral detail, even though I do not hear them ...
I also can jump at will inside a re-called recording, like inside a digital file, skipping parts, repeating parts ...
It does happen though that a re-called vocalist does not quite 'sing' the right words (even though those wrong words do sound in his or her very own vocal timbre), like happened to me only recently when I found out that I had the lyrics to Ray Davies' Celluloid Heroes (number 664 in last year's edition of the Radio 2 Top 2000, btw :-) ...) slightly wrong ...

Would you insist on me telling you what, if anything, I think it is that gets stuck there in that lumpy gray jelly inside our skulls, I'd say it is not the music, but more something that is like a contour. Contours that we somehow are able to 'fill in' again. And - corresponding to the different levels of detail that you may zoom in to - are these contours of a 'fractalish' kind?

But, hey man, of course all that's merely metaphor! Probably also this one can be found in Douwe Draaisma's interesting looking book Metaphors of Memory (which I haven't read yet, but I'll get myself a copy of the dutch original ('De Metaforenmachine') next time I'm in Holland). ( *** ).
Draaisma's lecture (Het menselijk geheugen en herinneringen aan geluid) was for me the most informative one of the day.

One of the things I learned was, for example, that musical psychologists have been long time investigating phenomena similar to what I called PMT in the recent 'Cellarlar Heroes' entry. (One refers to oorwurm in dutch, earworm in english ... : Can't get it out of my head ...)

Very relevant for the interpretation (and, though necessarily partial, explanation) of some of the observations made in the other lectures seems to be the so-called reminiscence effect: a remarkable 'bump' among virtually all elder (50+) individuals in both the quantity and quality of memories from their late teen-age and early adulthood ... There is a very nice chapter in Draaisma's Why life speeds up ... on this phenomenon, where it is discussed in relation to the autobiography of Willem van den Hull, a dutch schoolmaster living in the early nineteenth century.

Interesting, nay fascinating, all of this may be, it does not get us any closer to answering the question about what it is that happens to us when we memorize ... Do our and others' deeds and actions 'leave things behind' within us? Is our brain keeping traces of some sorts? And if so, then what are they? What do they look like? And how would they, how can they, relate to what they are supposedly traces of?
I doubt that - also in our time and age - any (combination of) modern science(s) can give us much more than metaphorical suggestions for possible answers. But I find it interesting and important enough to be tempted to read up a bit on what is going on in the field(s).
It was an inspiring day in Maastricht :-) ...

I have found John Sutton's paper 'Memory' (part of the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) to be a modest and useful point to start a such reading...
And well, yes, maybe our brain does not need 'traces', but somehow induces 'direct action between temporally remote events' ...
Maybe human memory really is a time machine ... ?
Farfetched as this may seem, it is one among other points of view.

Ah, and I do find it wildly attractive ... !

...

I attended the Sound Souvenirs symposium because I was invited by the organizers to present my Found Tapes project as part of the 'artistic' part of the day, that took place in the Klankwerkplaats in the early evening, after the talks.
Wendy Darling and myself heartily thank them for it. (You may click the image to enlarge ...)

As part of my 'installation' I handed each one of the visitors of the symposium a sound souvenir: a small plastic bag containing a picture of me as the 'Terrible Tape Man', and a strand of cassette tape. Some - and I do hope many - will keep the souvenir. Probably it will get lost somewhere in the back of a drawer. (It is just the sort of thing that always seems to end up there ...)
And then some day, some of them will find it back.
They will pick it up, look at in, look in it.
For a while they will wonder.
And then they'll remember ...

[ Earlier related SB-entries : 9 Beet Stretch :: face the music (the great vibrator) ]

[ 'TrckBcks' :: Sound Memories - DaveX (Startling Moniker) ]

notes __ ::
(*) Organized by the research group 'Sound Technologies and Cultural Practices' of the universities of Amsterdam and Maastricht, as part of the Sound Souvenirs project. [ ^ ]

(**) Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσε·
πολλῶν δ' ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ' ὅ γ' ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.
ἀλλ' οὐδ' ὧς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ·
αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
ἤσθιον· αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.
τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν ... (Homer, Odyssey) [ ^ ]

(***) Douwe Draaisma is a fine erudite, as well as a good and very readable writer on these subjects, so I'm happy to recommend his books to you. I did read his Why life speeds up as you get older (in dutch: "Waarom het leven sneller gaat als je ouder wordt"), mainly because I let myself be seduced by its intriguing title. That book is crammed with fascinating facts and stories related to the functioning and our experience of (autobiographical) memory. As to an answer to the question promised in its title: from reading the book I gathered that psychologists will consider this to be too simplistic, but I have yet to be convinced that at heart there is much more to this than the obvious 'relativistic' consolation that I give myself at times to calm urges of panic in view of what appears to be a 'psychological fact': when you are five years old, a year is a big twenty percent of all the time you ever knew ; when you get to be to fifty, that twenty has shriveled down to a mere two percent ... So then at fifty, how could a year not 'feel' to last ten times shorter than it 'felt' to last when one were five? ... [ ^ ]

tags: Maastricht, Sound Souvenirs, memory

# .214.

comments for Sound Souvenirs ::

Comments are disabled