Category: Sources

Toolbox

Digital tools to study the sonic imaginary of a dossier of aural and textual files.

Audacity

Source: https://www.audacityteam.org

Input: audio files (different formats)

Goal 1: Identify and label sound objects and earcons

Steps:

1. Set label structure: ID [File_Name-Type[OS or ER]-#], Sound-Name, Agency. Ex.: DI-ER1, tintineo, campana
2. Import audio file
3. Identify and label sound objects. Visual information (changes in frequency and amplitude) helps to accelerate the process.
4. Identify and label earcons.
5. Export labels

Output:

• Audio files labeled. Sample: Littérature espagnole de l’Amérique du Sud.aup
• List of labels on a .txt file. Sample: Label track.txt

Next steps: Clean data (remove time) and convert the table to .csv format. Sample: Diario Indio 2.csv

Goal 2: transcribe an audio file respecting its aural qualities as much as possible

Steps:

1. Import audio file
2. Use a tenth of the material as a case study to set the relationship between silences and punctuation marks
3. Using SilenceFinder tool, set a range of silence comparable to the division of paragraphs in textual files (In this case 2.5 s)
4. Transcribe

Output: text file. Sample: Diario Indio aural (fragmento)

Dedoose

Source: https://www.dedoose.com

Input: text files (.txt and .pdf)

Goal: Identify and label earcons

Steps:

1. Set codes and sub-codes: Sounds, Agency, Territory, Gender, Age
2. Import file (.txt or .pdf)
3. Identify earcons and add the corresponding codes
4. Apply a data set and some statistic tools to get some charts and tables
5. Export files

Output:

• Original text file labeled. Sample. Diario Indio.txt
• Charts and tables. Samples: Packed Code Cloud, Code Co-Occurrence Chart

Next steps: Use the data from the exported file to build a table similar to the one exported from Audacity. Sample: Diario Indio Aural y Textual.csv

Cytoscape

Source: https://cytoscape.org

Input: .csv files

Goal: Visualize sonic imaginaries as networks and analyze nodes centrality

Steps:

1. Set network’s nodes and attributes
2. Import .csv file using Import_Network_from_file tool
3. Run NetworkAnalyzer tool
4. Set a visualization style based on nodes centrality
5. Export tables and visualizations

Output:

• Visualization. Sample: Diario Indio and La playa sonic imaginaries as a network.png
• Edges and Nodes tables. Samples: Diario Indio and La playa sonic imaginaries EDGES table.csv; Diario Indio and La playa sonic imaginaries NODES table.csv

Versioning Machine 5.0

Source: http://v-machine.org

Input: textual files

Goal:

• visualize the transformations of a genetic dossier using as witnesses an aural draft and the published version
• compare the sonic imaginaries of both witnesses

Steps:

1. Decide whether to represent changes at the paragraph level or at the phrase level
2. Code comparative display of genetic dossier using TEI
3. Code the earcons correlations between versions and within each of them

Output: .html file. Sample: Diario Indio.html

Rationale

The development of sound production, conservation, and reproduction technologies makes us think that our understanding of aurality can only be studied from sound objects. However, before the emergence of these technologies, humanity used others—such as writing and painting—for a similar purpose. So, if we have acoustic technology to study the soundscapes of the 20th and 21st centuries, we must turn to textual and visual records “recorded” in non-aural formats to analyze those that precede their invention.

Fathers of Sound Studies such as Murray Schafer, who first developed the notion of soundscape, affirmed: “Thus, a writer is trustworthy only when writing about sounds directly experienced and intimately known […] and such descriptions constitute the best guide available in the reconstruction of soundscapes past” (100). In the expressions “directly experienced” and “intimately known” lies the dialectical relationship between soundscape and sonic imaginary since what becomes “known” in the most intimate is not acoustic reality itself but perception and desire. So, to analyze the aurality after the invention of the gramophone, it is convenient not only to listen to the sound records but also to the traces of these waves in other human cultural praxis.

These traces are produced through transduction, a process of transmitting aural information that produces unstable states of material in which lies, in turn, enough energy for another possible transduction. Another notion from which it is possible to study this exchange is transmediality, but then I would be focusing on the initial and final stages of the process—for example, a literary work adapted for film. In transduction, understood along the lines of Gilbert Simondon’s postulates, there is no initial or final state, only the transformed flow of information. Nor is there an agent responsible for these transformations, but rather a series of human and non-human mediations that contribute to transforming, translating, distorting, and modifying the meaning of elements they are supposed to convey (Bruno Latour).

So, by sonic imaginary, I refer to the textual, aural, and visual representations of sound organized from what I call aural politics. These politics record in the imagined aurality what was imposed during the sound reproduction and listening. Hence, it is possible to trace the links with issues of race, gender, and the exercise of power. However, these aural politics do not only reflect the impositions. They can also be shaped by the desires and resistance of subaltern or marginal actors. Then, it is convenient to “listen to” cultural productions to reveal impositions and negotiations made during identity formation, particularly in contexts of violence and displacement.

At the same time, these aural politics are responsible for the relative stability of the sonic imaginaries of an individual or community at any given historical moment. The idea of ​​a set of imaginary sound objects or earcons relatively organized by aural politics made me think about the possibility of studying the sonic imaginary as a network and the convenience of comparing different states of that network to show the effects of soundscapes and socioscapes on a sonic imaginary.

Of course, all these reflections on the sonic imaginary and how to study it were after a material discovery that affected me: the voice of Severo Sarduy. Reviewing the writer’s archive preserved in the Firestone Library at Princeton, I came across audio cassettes where this Cuban writer, painter, and publisher exiled in France had collected acoustic material from different sources and times. There were radio broadcasts, recordings made in situ in various parts of the world, voices of different tones speaking in different languages, fragments of songs, etc. In short, it was a chaotic catalog of sound objects “intimately known” and collected by someone who had worked for thirty years in French public radio, particularly in France Culture and Radio France International.

Among those tapes are two titled “Diario Indio.” In them, Sarduy records his impressions during his first trip to India. You can hear the soundscape behind the author’s voice: cars, animals, voices, music. At the same time, the first quarter of the material is not centered on Sarduy’s voice but the soundscape. Only after registering that sound otherness does he decide to speak. That acoustic material was the initial draft of the final chapter of the novel he was writing, Cobra (1972). My training in genetic criticism had led me to work with incomplete genetic dossiers, but this was the first time I had come across one in which the witnesses came from different backgrounds. As if that were not enough, in an interview from those years, Sarduy stated that this was a regular practice for him: dictating his ideas to an artifact as an initial creative step that could continue in writing or painting.

No scholar had before paid attention to his passionate defense of aurality. However, it seemed to be at the core of his creative processes. This was the beginning of my search for digital tools to explore Severo Sarduy’s sonic imagery.

The first step was to find tools to identify sound objects and earcons—in aural files—and earcons in texts. These tools should allow data to be exported and imported by other applications dedicated to studying and visualizing networks.

Because I was interested in aural politics and their relationship to social issues, it was not enough to identify sound objects or earcons. I needed to identify specific attributes associated with the emission of sound. These attributes relate to agency and context. To determine which ones could be most useful, I explored the aural and textual versions of the “Diario Indio”.

At first, and based on my knowledge of Sarduy’s written work, I considered that gender would be significant. However, I soon understood that Sarduy had a fluid conception of his characters’ gender, so it is unattainable to assign a label in most cases. It does not mean, however, that gender is a disposable category. On the contrary, there are areas of his production, such as the radio play La Plage, in which the female voices suffer a gradual silencing. However, as I progressed in the study, these peculiarities—based on a binary conception—became less interesting.

The same thing happened with age. In his novels and radio plays Sarduy regularly includes children’s and adolescent voices but, in the case of recordings, how to determine the age of a voice. If that voice is emitted from a record player, is it the same age? Once again, I must admit that there are works, like the radio play Chutes, in which what happens to three girls’ voices is decisive: Rosalia Lombardo, Anna Frank, and the Kumara Devi on duty. Yet, are they adolescent or children’s voices even in a piece like this?

The third feature of the agency that is interesting only in sections of Sarduy’s work is the geocultural origin of the sound. It is beneficial to highlight Sarduy’s interest in Afro-Latin music and its global diaspora, particularly in broadcasts such as La rumba. However, except for musical pieces, it is impossible for most sound objects and earcons to identify a geocultural association.

At the end of my exploration of the aural and textual versions of the Diario Indio I had two critical revelations. First, there is always more information about sound mediation in the textual files than in the aural ones. For example, the narrator or another character would help you assign a gender, an age, or a territory relatively often. However, this would rarely be possible in the case of sound files and radio broadcasts. So I gave up generalizing those attributes, although I kept their study for the case of texts, as seen in the Dedoose outputs that I offer as a sample in the Toolbox column, and in this chart, which shows the behavior of the Age, Gender and Territory attributes in three of Sarduy’s novels.

Secondly, I realized that non-human actors produced many sounds, and in many cases, the agency is related to the body (hands, feet, lips), not the subject. It emphasized an overlooked aspect of Sarduy’s work: his battle against the Western subject/logos, against his power of authorship and authorization from other ontologies. So the agency was important, but I went on to group it into larger macro-categories:

• biophony (sounds of non-human living beings)
• technophony (sounds produced by mechanical and electrical devices)
• cosmophony (sounds produced by non-living natural elements)
• spectrophony (sounds produced by supernatural beings: angels, gods, ghosts, etc.)
• anthropophony (intelligible and harmonic human sounds such as the voice that speaks or sings, as long as an artifact does not mediate it)
• corporophony (unintelligible human sounds: laughter, tears, sighs, belches…)

This table shows the central place of technophony in the sonic imaginary of Cobra, where the sounds produced by objects and artifacts are almost as crucial as those produced by humans. You can read all the fragments of the same novel in which an artifact sounds in this other table. Both are data exported from Dedoose.

Once the sound objects and earcons were identified and the agency attributes marked in each case, I imported the data into Cytoscape. Even though this is an application designed to study biological networks, it allows visualizing and analyzing other types of networks through specific tools. In this case, I was interested in visualizing the centrality of certain sounds and agents. The current version of Cytoscape (3.9.1) no longer supports the visualization associated with the NetworkAnalyzer tool. Failing this, the user must manually choose each element to be displayed. The graphs displayed in the Toolbox column were designed in the previous version, which allowed direct visualization of categories such as centrality. This new graphic shows the centrality of birds, artifacts, and the human in the sonic imaginary shared by the versions of the “Diario Indio” and the radio play La Plage:

As part of my final explorations of transduction, I have visualized the transformations of that imagery using the Versioning Machine 5.0. The advantages of this application lie in the comparative publication of different versions of the same file. The user can access the online publication in the samples that I provide in the Toolbox column. Changes were coded using the parallel segmentation method and TEI standard for the representation of texts in digital form.

I cannot offer the user personal recordings and radio broadcasts for copyright reasons. Therefore, I have resorted to the published version of the content in textual format and the coding of the transformations in the sonic imaginary of “Diario Indio”. The central purpose of this project was to outline a protocol for the comparative study of aural and textual archives and tools for the visualization of the sonic imagery recorded in these archives. This post contains those tools, samples of the results obtained, and an overview of the methods used. A self-reflective component of this process, including other explored tools, is available here.

Latour, Bruno. Reensamblar lo social. Una introducción a la teoría del actor-red. Buenos Aires: Manantial, 2005.

Schafer, R. Murray. “The Soundscape”, Jonathan Sterne (ed.) The Sound Studies Reader. London/New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 95-103.

Simondon, Gilbert. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2005.