Toop - Sinister resonance the mediumship of the listener

Out of deep dreamless sleep I was woken, startled by a hollow resonance, a sudden impact of wood on wood. Was the sound an isolated auditory event within my consciousness a moment of dream without narrative or duration or was it a real sound from the physical world? The reverberation time was too long for the sound to have emanated from the bedroom. This would imply a sound coming from somewhere else in the house, an echoing space, mysterious and distant. If that was the case, then I could only assume the presence of an intruder, unlikely as a possibility. The sound came from nowhere, belonged nowhere, so had no place in the world except through my description.

Words fly away; the written letter remains. Sound is absence, beguiling; out of sight, out of reach. What made the sound? Who is there? Sound is void, fear and wonder. Listening, as if to the dead, like a medium who deals only in history and what is lost, the ear attunes itself to distant signals, eavesdropping on ghosts and their chatter. Unable to write a solid history, the listener accedes to the slippage of time.

This possibility that sound is nothing is characteristic of sound, perplexing, disturbing, yet dangerously seductive. Distant sounds of unknown origin are enshrined in myths, such as the Swedish legend of the Ncken naked male water sprites living in rivers and lakes who lure children to their deaths with songs and the sounds of musical instruments. They have no reality as physical beings yet their sound, just beyond reach, is a deadly lure. Sound is a present absence; silence is an absent present. Or perhaps the reverse is better: sound is an absent presence; silence is a present absence? In this sense, sound is a sinister resonance an association with irrationality and inexplicability, that which we both desire and dread. Listening, then, is a specimen of mediumship, a question of discerning and engaging with what lies beyond the world of forms. When sound, silence and other modalities of auditory phenomena are represented through silent media, this association of mediumship becomes more acute. Dwelling in every written text there are voices; within images there is some suggestion of acoustic space. Sound surrounds, yet our relation to its enveloping, intrusive, fleeting nature is fragile (a game of Chinese whispers) rather than decisive.

As a boy I read James Fenimore Coopers nineteenth-century novel, The Last of the Mohicans , and became fixated on preternatural hearing, a recurring theme of the book, No footfall is safe from the cracking of a dry stick, no rustling of leaf free from suspicion: night trembles with calls and whispers that demand perpetual vigilance. The name of the central character is Hawk-eye, the scout with raptor vision, yet what I recall, and a rereading confirms this, is the importance of hearing to survival in the forest. Hawk-eyes companion, Chingachgook, is always alert, head turned aside, as though he listened to some distant and distrusted sounds. Cooper wrote frequently of a breathing silence through which the harried protagonists must pass, often in darkness or concealment from their French or Iroquois enemies. Though the narrative becomes laborious and barely credible, Cooper maintains interest with vivid descriptions of an intense engagement with a sublime yet dangerous environment. Sight is prioritized the naming of this engagement falls by default to the eye but some of the most strikingly affective incidents of the story are auditory. When the fugitives led by Hawk-eye shelter in a cave, the comically pious singer, David Gamut, is interrupted in his impromptu recital of psalmody by a cry, neither human, nor earthly.

In this context, the cave functions as a vernacular church in which the sonorous tones of Christianity resonate in natural acoustics. Wilderness is reclaimed by holy texts that stir the emotions and raise the morale of the listeners, only to be pulled back into inexplicability by an external sound so strange that even the scout is inclined momentarily to consider unearthly origins. If twere only a battle, he says, it would be a thing understood by us all, and easily managed, but I have heard that when such shrieks are atween heaven and arth, it betokens another sort of warfare! Though the sound is understood eventually as the screams of terrified horses, its capacity to unnerve and confound is so powerful that only supernatural origins seem adequate as an explanation.

In The Haunting , Robert Wises 1963 film adaptation of Shirley Jacksons psychological ghost story, a harp sounds without any sign of human activation, a sinister resonance. I dont believe in ghosts, at least not the kind hunted in television programmes like Most Haunted wan creatures draped in white, clanking knights and headless horsemen that nobody actually sees. But I am fascinated by the spectral qualities of sound, disturbing noises, eerie silences and the enchantments of music. Distant music is the perfect poetic expression for such qualities (another debt we owe to James Joyce), a reaching back into the lost places of the past, the slippages and mirages of memory, history reaching forward in the intangible form of sound to reconfigure the present and future.

All of us, or should I say those of us equipped from the beginning with the faculty of hearing, begin as eavesdroppers in darkness, hearing muffled sounds from an external world into which we have yet to be born. The film editor and sound recordist who invented the term sound design, Walter Murch, was intrigued by the paradox of hearing. Four and a half months after conception we begin to hear. This is the first of our senses to function: hearing dominates amniotic life and yet after birth its importance is overtaken by seeing. As a revolutionary sound designer for films such as The Conversation , THX-1138 , American Graffiti and Apocalypse Now , Murch wondered why this should be so. The reasons, no doubt, go far back into our evolutionary past, he wrote in an essay called Sound Design: The Dancing Shadow, but I suspect it has something to do with the childs discovery of causality. Sound, which had been absolute and causeless in the womb, becomes something understood to happen as the result of. The enjoyment a child takes in banging things together is the enjoyment of this discovery: first there is no sound, and then bang! there is. If Murch is right, then sound without apparent source will always return us at some unconscious level to our pre-birth state, but with the added anxiety of awareness, of knowing that sounds should have a cause. If they lack a cause, then our need is to invent one.