1Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, A!ect, and the Ecology of Fear. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

2Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

3See Bruno Latour, “Sensitizing,” in this volume.

What is sound? What is sounding?

An ample, adjustable definition for both terms is resonance, pre-cisely because resonance is and is not sound. Stretching beyond the acoustic, auditory, and audible to reach the zone of the vibratory, resonance transduces energies across various media. Therefore, it can enlist not only the sonic but also the tactile and haptic, as well as that which oscillates just beyond the sensible, in the domain of what dubstep artist Kode9 calls unsound.1 Resonance—transductive and synchronous vibration—operates, too, in the register of the associa-tive imagination, which turns out to be, with some frequency, at the very center of its imagined opposite: scientific rationality. In Reason and Resonance, historian of sound Veit Erlmann suggests that there is a minor-key Western tradition that has hearing, listening, and feeling resonance as a path to reason.2 If the dominant visual idiom of reflec-tion has posited that the mind is a mirror of the world—an entity detached, apart, objective—then resonance suggests participating in the world, moving in sympathy, working in an empirically attuned embodiment. Resonance allows us to understand how energy must always be translated, through a relay of associations, in order for it to be received at a point distant from its source.

Within this alternative Western tradition of resonant rational-ity, the human has been envisaged as an Aeolian harp, an instru-ment named for the ancient Greek ruler of the winds, Aeolus. The Aeolian harp !see facing" resonates with the wind, animated by the world around it, air brought to a dynamic instability so that it might oscillate strings and transduce energies that are thereby moved to sing. Such a harp, made by humans, becomes an eerie nonhu-man agent, famously celebrated in the poems of Samuel Coleridge, the music of Frédéric Chopin, and the works and philosophies of other Romantics. The Victorians considered the harp a sensitive, an attuned being, imagined in that age as essentially feminine (whether Bruno Latour’s “Sensitizing” invites an ungendering or transgen-dering of the sensitive is open to question).3 When Henry David Thoreau listened to wind traveling through telegraphy wires—those 19th-century modern skeins of cables carrying significant signals—the Aeolian harp of the Romantics went electric !FIG. 1".

TRANSDUCINGStefan Helmreich

FIGURE XAeolus blowing forth at point A, in Athanasius Kircher’s “Machinamentum X” from Musurgia Universalis (1650), page 353.

FIG. X

163

4Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). For “clicks and tweeks,” see the discussion of the words used by early telegraphers in their descriptions of what were eventually revealed as ionospheric sounds; See Stanford Very Low Frequency Group webpage.

5Hermann Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonemp!indungen als physi-ologie Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik, 5th ed. (Brunswic: Vieweg & Sohn, 1896), 633. This source is cited in Timothy Lenoir, “Helmholtz & the Materialities of Communication,” Osiris 9 (1994): 185!207.

6Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950!1980,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35, no. 1 (2010): 113!39.

7Neil Harbisson demonstrates his “eyeborg” in his July 2012 TED talk, “I Listen to Color,” https://www.ted.com/speakers/neil_harbisson.

That cybernetic story reverberates in the work of Alvin Lucier, known for compositions that investigate sound as resonance, as transduction, as amplification, or as perceptual effect. Lucier, too, has tapped the aelectrosonic, setting up antennae to pick up the energies of lightning whistling through the ionosphere (codified in his 1981 piece Sferics), an activity featured in Robert Ashley’s film about him, Music with Roots in the Aether (1975). With Lucier’s 1969 I Am Sitting in a Room, “composition” is given over to the resonant frequencies of a room in which a speaking and listening performer sits, an enclosed space that begins to hum with reverberations set off by the simple probe of a voice, recorded, and recursively replayed into the same space, then recorded again, both testing the sonic affordances of specific spaces and making them ring like resonant bells and lapping baths of sound. In the 1965 Music for Solo Performer, Lucier scaled resonance down from the atmospheric and even down from the architectural-acoustic, to the realm of the internal bodily milieu, amplifying brainwaves of the alpha state in order to produce impulses that would activate percussion instruments—a practice of cyborg resonance that blurs boundaries between the intentional, agentive human author and the in human electromagnetic materials of which fleshy bodies are made. This piece is, in the vernacular, “mind-blowing.” It forms what I want to call an “audiodelic” exploration of the insides and outsides of human experience akin to what Tauba Auerbach theorizes for the psychedelia of color. Lucier’s performative range complicates a simplistic notion of signal transmission-reception. (See Tauba Auerbach, “Amphibian,” and Alvin Lucier with Brian Kane, “Resonance” in this volume.) Resonance and transduction are both active, ensuring that while the listening subject is specifically situ-ated, she is also filtered, calibrated, and tuned to pick up signals amid noise, sometimes switching the cultural valuation of one for the other (turning noise into signal, nonsense into sense). Listeners become the sound engineers of their own spatial-temporal experience.

There may be resonance in the forest without animals to hear it, but there is no life of sound as such without an animate apparatus of sensing. My own interest in the anthropology of sound led me to join a submarine dive in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s three-person research submersible named Alvin !FIG. 2". (One might hope this was in homage to Lucier, but in fact the namesake was Allyn Vine, a scientist at Woods Hole.) Sinking to the bottom of the sea in order to explore underwater volcano fields in the eastern Pacific Ocean, the submarine surrounded its human inhabitants with the sounds of sonar pings, of cyborgian robotic subroutines, of the MP3 player of the pilot. These auditory emanations all contrib-uted to my sense of immersion: in sound, in water, in the culture of oceanographers. But that immersion was hard won—the result of an assembly of technologies working well, working in sync, working

Sifting wind through their wiry strings, telegraph cables also oscillated in another, more interior, realm. Resonating in the audible range of human hearing, they simultaneously transduced via their inner channels the resonance of electromagnetic energy from the earth’s ionosphere. The off-duty machinist Thomas A. Watson, listening in on this static sizzle, was more fascinated by such “clicks and tweeks” than his boss Alexander Graham Bell, hearing it as a kind of unearthly 20th-century music of the spheres. Here, human sensing moved into the domain of what media scholar Douglas Kahn calls the aelectrosonic.4 Strings and wires, resonance without and within, the transduction of celestial energies into accessible form—the aelectrosonic became a model for what modern human hearing could aspire to be. For Hermann von Helmholtz, of course, hearing had already become explicable through an analogy with the telegraph; the ear was “a tuning fork interrupter with attached resonators,” transducing sound for the listening mind.5 Fast-forward to information theory at mid-20th century, at which moment the MIT-based founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, turned hearing into a function that might be imitated and installed in cyborgs, looping acoustic capacities between organisms and machines. Such cyborgian sounds have been with us ever since. They weave through modern music, as Christina Dunbar-Hester suggests—from the work of John Cage to Bebe Barron to Wendy Carlos to Brian Eno to Afrika Bambaataa to Jessica Rylan to Janelle Monáe.6 Cyborg sounds find themselves instantiated in technologies such as the cochlear implant, or the “eyeborg” that allows color-blind Neil Harbisson to “hear” color.7

FIGURE 1Illustration for Karl von Schlözer, “The Romance of a Telegraph Wire,” The Strand Magazine 3 (January–June 1892), page 202.

164 165III. SOUNDING

TransducingStefan Helmreich

8In a related text titled “Transduction,” I argue for a “transductive anthro-pology” that listens for the distortions and resistances that might reveal the fault lines beneath any self-evident “presence.” This text can be found in Keywords in Sound Studies: Towards A Conceptual Lexicon, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 222!31.

9Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2009), 137.

in harmony. The components of this sonic envelope formed by the ocean itself, sloshing around us, were thoroughly mediated and structured in this situation. The water had to stay outside the sub; so what were we hearing in our small pod of displaced and sub-merged air? Put simply, in order for us submariners to feel immersed in sea sound, this energy had to be seamlessly transduced, trans-lated from the watery surround into our interior sphere. There is no self-evident immersion, no self-evident presence, without the work of signal transduction, which can glitch at any time, drowning us in sound unwound. No self-evident “presence,” because that merely labels the experience of immersion without acknowledging the transducing processes that always already need to be there. There is no life of sound without an apparatus of sensing, and this trans-ducing apparatus frames and forms effects typically associated with subjective experience. In this sense, presence might be understood to be a particularly convincing illusion formed as various processes unfold—the registration of sound waves on eardrums, the transduc-tion of mechanical vibration into neuronal impulses, the reading of same as identifiable sources of sound—each of which require multi-ple acts of transduction before presence can be felt.8

But presence implies co-presence (being “in the presence of”). Being present to sonic energy can give humans the feeling of

10Michel Chion, “Un langage pour décrire les sons,” Programm-Bulletin du G.R.M 16:39"75, at 65. Translation in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. from the French by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 100.

11Tara Rodgers, “‘What, For Me, Con-stitutes Life in a Sound?’: Electronic Sounds as Lively and Di#erentiated Individuals,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 509!30. On “big bloom-ing buzzing confusion,” see William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890).

12See Robert Brain, The Pulse of Mod-ernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015) for a history of how inscriptions came to be imagined as indexical traces of preexisting phenomena, rather than as representations of events (e.g., pulse rates, speech) already isolated and conceptualized through abstraction.

something preexisting their sensing. Back in 1960, minimalist com-poser La Monte Young proposed, according to musician and criti-cal theorist Seth Kim-Cohen, “sound as an organism with its own reason for being.”9 And in 1975, French critic and composer Michel Chion pronounced that sound “unscrolls itself, manifests itself within time, and is a living process, energy in action.” 10 These are tropes of presence as self-evident: sound is there, living and acting, Being. But, as electronic music critic Tara Rodgers has shown, such statements emerge from an audio-technical tradition, dating back to Helmholtz, that gives to sounds the status of discrete individuals whose lifetimes can be graphed, whose energies can be isolated from the “big blooming buzzing” world whose properties can be purified (as with the sine wave), and whose essences can be known through the shape of the waveform.11 Rodgers argues that the wave-form, rather than simply a preexisting thing in the world, should rather be seen as an artifact of the technological apparatuses designed to capture and represent it— exemplified by the 1943 Triumph Wobbulator !FIG. 3". Once pictured in this way, the wave-form’s technological origins are often erased, its debts to transduc-ing operations forgotten. The waveform is present in sound. In a term borrowed from Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar’s Laboratory Life, the waveform becomes an inscription, one that resonates with its conditions of production, but then effaces these in an autotelic fantasy of disclosing a pure reality.12

Resonance has a history, a language, and an infrastructure. It is indebted to transduction, all the way up, down, and across. In the contemporary moment, we and our machines have come to special-ize in transducing operations in order to produce what we can then call experience.

FIGURE 2The three-person submersible ve hicle “Alvin” was built for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (Woods Hole, MA) in 1964 and has been overhauled several times, with none of its original parts still operational; it is designed to take scientists more than 12,000 feet below the surface of the ocean for up to nine hours per dive. The submarine continues to be transported around the world by support vessels in order to undertake dives, and has made over 4,800 dives in more than four decades of activity.

FIGURE 3 The Triumph 830 Wobbulator, an oscillograph machine manufactured in the US, 1943.

166 167III. SOUNDING

Stefan Helmreich Transducing

Pier Paolo Pasolini, from Space Poem #4, 2013. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

Lina Bo Bardi, from Space Poem #4, 2013. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

Félix Guattari, from Space Poem #4, 2013. Double-sided ban-ner, 32 x 42 in.

Years, 1887!1896, from Space Poem #5 (Years & Afters), 2015. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

After I Am Dead Darling, from Space Poem #5 (Years & Afters), 2015. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

Years, 1897!1906, from Space Poem #5 (Years & Afters), 2015. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

After Melville, from Space Poem #5 (Years & Afters), 2015. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

Years, 1907!1916, from Space Poem #5 (Years & Afters), 2015. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

After Their Quarrel, from Space Poem #5 (Years & Afters), 2015. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

Green, p. 286 A Chronicle of Social Experiments, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

Foucault, p. 289!92 Excerpt from Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954"1984. © 1994 by Editions Gallimard. Compilation, introduction, and new translations © 2000 by The New Press. Reprinted by permission of The New Press. www.thenewpress.com.

Ranciere, p. 309!12 Excerpt from Jacques Rancière, “Prelude,” originally published in Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. London and New York: Verso, 2013. pp. IX!XVI. Reprinted by permission of Verso Books, UK.

Latour, p. 314 Courtesy International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)/Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

Latour, Figs. 3A and 3B Photograph by Paula Court. Courtesy The Kitchen, NY, Compagnie AccenT, Paris, and Soif Compagnie, Vaux sur Seine.

Latour, p. 324 Photograph by David Bornstein. Courtesy Compagnie AccenT, Paris, and Soif Compagnie, Vaux sur Seine.

Frank, p. 142 Photograph by Philip Makanna. Courtesy Lovely Music. Video by Philip Makanna. Courtesy Lovely Music.

Mills, p. 150!51 Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, Courtesy of Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Mills, Fig. 1 Collection of Mara Mills.

Mills, Fig 2 Courtesy MIT Libraries.

Helmreich, Fig. 3 Photograph courtesy Richard Sears.

Saraceno, p. 170 © Max Planck Institute, 2005.

Saraceno, p. 171 © Max Planck Institute, 2005. Courtesy Volker Springel and the Virgo Consortium.

Saraceno, Fig. 1 With the support of Fondazione Garrone, Genoa, and Fondazione Sambuca, Palermo. Special thanks to Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa. Photograph © Alessandro Coco, 2009.

Saraceno, Fig. 2 © Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2010.

Saraceno, p. 174!79 Social Strings, 2015.

Saraceno, p. 174!75 Semi social mapping of BaasdR2237!0607 LA1 by three Cyrtophora citricola-three weeks, detail, 2015. Spider silk, paper, glue, ink. © Tomás Saraceno, 2015.

Saraceno, p. 176!77 Solitary, semi social mapping of BR2237!0607LA2 by one Nephila clavipes-#ive weeks, two Cyrtophora citricola-two weeks, detail, 2015. Spider silk, paper, glue, ink. © Tomás Saraceno, 2015.

Saraceno, p. 178!79 Solitary, semi social mapping of TNJ0924!2201 by one Nephila clavipes-one week, three Cyrtophora citricola, one week, detail, 2015. Spider silk, paper, glue, ink. © Tomás Saraceno, 2015.

Saraceno, Fig. 3 Installation © Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2012!2013. Photograph © Alessandro Coco. Curated by Andrea Lissoni. Courtesy Tomás Saraceno; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY; Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen; and Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa.

Saraceno, Fig. 4 Drawn by Heidi Erickson.

Saraceno, Fig. 5 Courtesy Hangar Bicocca. © Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2012"2013. Photo Studio Alessandro Coco.

Saraceno, Fig. 7 © Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tenenbaum, Fig. 1B Photograph by Jim Henderson.

Schüll, p. 194 Courtesy Mette Dyhrberg.

Kelly, p. 204 © Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology.

Kelly, Fig. 1 Courtesy Naomi Tjaden and Paul Trainor, Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Kansas City, MO.

Kahn, p. 214 Image from the Science Service Historical Images Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Courtesy General Electric.

Kahn, Fig. 3 Museum der Dinge-Werkbundarchiv, Berlin.

Kahn, Fig. 4 Courtesy Private Collection, The Stapleton Collection, and Bridgeman Images.

Gallese, p. 236 Courtesy Claire Denis and Pyramide International. © Pyramide International.

Gallese, Fig. 1 © Thomas Struth. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, NY.

Husserl, p. 237!40 Republished with permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston; from Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book; Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (1989); permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Green, p. 277!288 Banners reproduced in Experience Process: Space Poems. All images by Renée Green. Courtesy of Renée Green and Free Agent Media:

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Green, p. 280 I Am Still Alive, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

Green, p. 281 “I” Am Still Alive, from Space Poem #1, 2007. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

Green, p. 283 The Experience of Freedom, from Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho), 2012. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

Prisoner of Love, from Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho), 2012. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

After The Last Sky, from Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho), 2012. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

Terrible Honesty, from Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho), 2012. Double-sided banner, 17.5 x 22 in.

Green, p. 284!85 Discovery But A Fountain Without Source, from Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words), 2009. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

Legend of Mist and Lost Patience, from Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words), 2009. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

The Body Swimming in Itself, from Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words), 2009. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

Is Dissolution’s Darling, from Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words), 2009. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

With Dripping Mouth It Speaks A Truth, from Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words), 2009. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

That Cannot Lie, In Words Not Born Yet, from Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words), 2009. Double-sided banner, 32 x 42 in.

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