Listening through the Geologic

The heuristics that we apply when thinking about sound are undoubtedly anthropocentric (Stocker 2013: 103-104). While studies of non-human hearing systems grant the perceptibility of ultra- and infra- sounds, I effectively limit the definition of sound as a carrier of meaning to that which falls between a certain frequency range. More crucially, concerning this project, I routinely restrict my definition of sound to that which is able to vibrate the human tympanic membrane and in due course elicit the movement of the cochlear stereocilia, thus severely constraining the meaningful temporo-sonic envelope. Notwithstanding recording technologies, I consider sounds to “die away.” 

If I were to grant audibility, through the stretching of this definition of hearing, to agency situated beyond the human temporo-sonic envelope (i.e. sounds not currently sounding), what would we hear? What are the voices, figuratively speaking, that we would be compelled to consider? And left with this multiplicitous cacophony would we be forced to reconsider the efficacy of forms of historical narrative that prescribe future action based upon convenient distillations of certain subsets of past agency? After all, what are they willfully omitting?

Such an extended approach would parallel methodologies utilized in the earth sciences and in archaeology. A geologist engages with sedimentary traces, gleaning understanding from the structural arrangements of these remnants, and acknowledging that the past is also an active participant in the present, through forces such as tectonics and the migration of dormant deposits in the form of erosion. As François Bonnet reminds us: “The area of sound is also constituted by the traces that sounds leave behind and the histories upon which they draw” (Bonnet 2016: 61).

How could we then listen geologically to geographical locations of shifting meaning? How could the very act of trying to listen in to the distant past embedded in these sites slow us down to engage with complexity in ways that promote the empathic notions of deep time and tolerance of a site’s multi-vocality? Furthermore, where could such a methodology be employed? Surely, enabling a greater field of agents to influence the present (and hence the future) makes it more difficult to create oversimplifying characterizations and prescriptions of our neighbors, human or otherwise.

At this stage in the project, these questions are only being posed. As of yet it suggests no conclusive answers. It simply listens through a geologic metaphor. This indeterminacy is in itself important. The tendency is to avoid limbos and instead seek out stasis and certitude. But with that always comes willful denial of detail and contradiction.

Whilst the ephemerality of sound is key to how it is employed through our navigation of the world, it can also act “to heighten our sense of what is already missing or passing: memories of previous experiences, possibly, as well as the energetic intensities that still reside within our auditory unconscious. In this regard, a sound may loom to ultimately rivet together presence and absence, to open a door onto the all too real” (LaBelle: 319-320).

As you strain to hear the past in these recordings, you can imagine an incredibly busy aural vanishing point. On the one hand you are allowing for the presence of the inaudible, whilst on the other you have to contend with an epistemological noise floor where the link between the real and the speculative dissolves at some indeterminate point.

You can also imagine brushing away one layer in an attempt to hear the next, part of a process that is made all the more difficult by the leeching in and out of one stratum to the neighboring one and the sifting and folding of particles and layers, a process illustrative of Deleuze and Guattari's notion (2014: 47) of double articulation within stratification. Through this process, the past is constantly in communication with itself and with the present.