Hotel Womb:
or, Sound Art Before You Were Born
by Nat
Bates
Maybe you've heard this one before…
In utero, four and a half months after conception,
the foetus begins to hear. Well before sight,
smell, taste and touch are anything more
than a vague hint of the surrounding world,
sound is bombarding the unborn child. And
a barrage of sound it is. A recording made
through the belly of a pregnant woman designed
to serve as a soundtrack to a video of an
ultrasound examination, sounds not unlike
submersion in water – constant muffled
rumbling broken intermittently by louder
muffled rumbling sounds. The images recorded
via an ultrasound are made possible by the
use of extremely low frequency soundwaves,
penetrating the woman's body and bouncing
back, not unlike radar.
This provides a fascinating insight into
the womb but what of the accompanying 'insound'?
Recorded by a contact microphone through
the wall of the pregnant woman's abdomen,
it's surely a very inaccurate representation
of the acoustic environment of the womb.
We have to imagine what it would really
sound like: the thundering of mother's heart,
her enormous bellow lungs drawing and expelling
air, her digestive system tangle pushing
around fluids and solids in every gushing
direction. But perhaps more important than
what a foetus hears, after all it is well
short of the cognitive ability to even note
"Oh, that was a sound!", is the
issue of how these sounds sound. Through
fluid, at close proximity, muffled, bassy,
lacking high frequency definition - all
descriptions, it should be noted, that make
a comparison with post-natal, external-world
hearing.
A great deal of fuss is made about the fact
that the unborn child hears its mother's
voice more often than any other sound (of
external origin.) The common wisdom being
that a mother talking to her newborn gives
the child something familiar to latch onto,
to calm its wide eyed terror at this big
bright universe it has been coldly thrown
into. I'll happily accept that sonic familiarity
in a newborn is more likely than recognition
in any of the other senses, but would a
woman's voice only ever heard internally
through her body really be recognized in
the outside world? Perhaps a child with
a few years of listening and mental sonic
cataloguing to rely on might be able to
realize that this is the same voice once
heard through blood and bone now heard through
air. That this voice now appearing to emanate
from the mouth of a woman is the same voice
that rippled though the warm amniotic fluid
like the voice of God. But a newborn?
If ever you come across someone who honestly
believes that playing Mozart to a child
through the wall of the uterus will improve
the brat's intelligence ('because of all
the rich frequencies, don't you know?'),
do me a favour and just tell them to get
down to the Prahran pool here in Melbourne
and experience Beethoven piped underwater.
As the locals do their laps, apart from
the loss of frequency information, there's
an awful lot of noise in the ears as that
water sloshes about. Most of us have experienced
the harsh radio-static interference sound
of water in the ears. But then again, hearing
an orchestra through water is probably how
the music sounded to the composer himself
as he aged, his hearing degenerating into
deafness.
But here's my point. Just as Ludwig in his
later years had to compose with his head
resting on top of the piano, giving the
soundwaves a more direct route through wood
into flesh and bone, so too do we all experience
sound as physical vibration, and at the
very commencement of our lives. This is
the sensory experience that rocks our world,
that shapes and defines our environment,
that is our environment for the first months
of existence. We hear it and we feel it.
And when we are suddenly pushed and bullied
by forces we can't even comprehend, let
alone resist, through that ridiculously
narrow passage and into the 'light', and
it's violently cold and bright, it all sounds
different, wrong, unfamiliar, alien. All
of a sudden there is something to compare
the old world to, to contrast with 'home'
and we all react in the only way we can.
We scream. Loudly. Drown out the alien noises.
Make our own sound, under our own control.
The womb then gets recreated in the outside
world, in a myriad of ways, each of us subconsciously
yearning for the security and comfort of
the past. But the key to a successful 'hotel
womb' is in the sonic. The constant muffled
rumbling we all secretly love. And every
sound that gets added to the mix must be
dull punctuation or in smooth sympathy.
The car is a travelling womb: purring engine,
rubber humming over asphalt, wind rushing
past sealed windows. (Why, at peak hour,
can one see row after row of cars designed
to accommodate four all carrying just one?)
The Walkman also allows you to totally disconnect
yourself from the sound of the world, the
world of sounds, whatever your taste in
music. (This is quite different from the
'ghetto blaster' perched upon the shoulder,
as this is clearly an outward act of sonic
violence, forcibly claiming a larger space
around oneself than social conventions usually
allow.) An effective Walkman womb is not
just a question of volume (i.e., turning
down or drowning out the external sounds)
but also a matter of equalization (i.e.,
the cutting of high frequencies, the muffling
effect.)
One doesn't even need music if the headphones
can cover the ears and create an acoustic
seal, attenuating the idiot rantings of
the public transport losers beside one,
turning them into a distant radio soap opera.
And so it becomes easy to understand the
allure of a sonically effective 'hotel womb';
the soothing drone of the dryer/dishwasher/electric
fan inducing domestic narcosis; the calming
intermittent swooshing of traffic outside
the bedroom window at 3am; the lulling drumming
of rain on the iron roof overhead; the hypnotic
rattle of a late afternoon suburban train;
the mesmerizing babble of rushing water
in the huge pipes of a causeway overflow;
the hubbub of a dozen candlelit conversations
in a crowded restaurant; and so on.
To be honest, a lot of the music I listen
to plays the part of acoustic uterine wall.
I'm employing music in that role right now,
as I write this. It creates the barrier
to the wider environment that I need to
get into my own headspace, to concentrate
on my own internal world, to block out the
distracting trivialities of other people.
(It's ironic that the work that I do is
always for other people – without
an audience to receive my work I wouldn't
see the need – but I can only actually
do it by ignoring them/you.)
An effective sonic womb is only possible
when it does not require one's full aural
attention. Engaging sonic detail or repetition
that becomes irritating are the pitfalls
to avoid. It's ironic, or perhaps the whole
point, that the musical genres of Minimalism
and Drone are the practice of focussing
attention upon the details of seemingly
unchanging, static sounds or melodic phrases.
When one gets into this state of listening,
acutely aware of minute changes and subtleties,
whether or not one takes it to transcendental
extremes, it is in some ways the opposite
of the anesthetizing womb, but paradoxically
can have a similar effect; insulating, engulfing,
immersing.
Piped music, as in the recorded music played
in public spaces, depending upon it's intended
function, can be either perfect sonic insulation
or the very opposite. In department stores
the subtle, difficult to hear music is designed
to encourage you to move through the store,
from potential purchase to potential purchase.
So while it encases you, encouraging you
to focus upon the retail product at hand,
it also breaks the embryonic shell by creating
a narrative flow to prevent stasis and excessive
lingering. The ultimate mall music, being
instrumental music produced by the company
called Muzak , has long since disappeared
from common usage, but it had excellent
womb-like qualities; vaguely familiar melodies
in smooth instrumental arrangements. Alternatively,
the music you hear in food courts nowadays
is usually Top 40 radio and it tries to
grab your attention and hold you there,
seducing you into a few more minutes away
from the hustle and bustle, another bucket
of chips, maybe a cola. However, both these
examples of piped music face the problem
of becoming irritating if you listen too
closely.
From all this one can clearly see that sound
is intrinsically linked to environment,
and environment is something one experiences,
as opposed to observes. Surround sound,
or the presentation of sound art on a number
of loudspeakers greater than two, is currently
heralded as a step forward in the creation
of immersive sonic environments. This is
all well and good but sound is always immersive,
it always pervades the environment, even
from a very quiet singular source.
If one accepts that art is communication
then sound art is communication via environment.
It becomes logical that sound artists should
be interested in installation, where a total
environment can be constructed in order
to communicate. But artists should not feel
that installation is the only suitable format
for sound work. If one considers the environments
in which a work might be experienced, and
think of the work as a letter bomb or a
missile that can penetrate outer skins to
explode at the core, then opportunities
for communication may present themselves
in surprising ways. Artists working in public
spaces have the challenge of overcoming
potential inhibitors already located in
public space, from traffic and countless
other sonic interferences, to indifference
and unpreparedness in the attitudes of people,
inadvertently finding themselves art goers.
On the other hand these are all things that
could be taken advantage of. To infiltrate
the 'hotel wombs' of people and subtly alter
their environment takes subterfuge and shrewdness.
Being aware of expectations and finding
ways to play with them is ultimately what
I'm suggesting here.
The evolution of music has largely been
a result of artists challenging conventions
while working within them. A recent example
would be the current excitement in the UK
over the new phenomenon of 'bootlegging'
where an a cappella version of a well known
pop song is overlaid onto an instrumental
version of another well known pop song.
Here again people's attraction to the familiar
drives the practice, in addition to the
play with expectations. Such a track consisting
of Kylie Minogue's vocal for "Can't
Get You Outta My Head' over top of New Order's
'Blue Monday' even made it onto mainstream
Melbourne radio pop station FoxFM. That
was a gentle but significant little detonation
in the radio environment.
All this may sound like some Marxist yearning
for the reconciliation of art and life.
Not so. I am under no such hippie delusions.
American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt once
said, "Art is art-as-art and everything
else is everything else." Sound art
may be currently in vogue, it may be hip
and groovy, (and it may just as quickly
become passé) but it cannot be anything
more 'useful' or 'pragmatic' than any other
art form has ever been. And so should it
be. But that's not to say that artists don't
exist in the same world as everyone else,
that we are somehow outside of society.
Of course not. We are born, we eat, we shit
and we die like the rest of humanity. It's
just that what we spend most of our energy
doing has absolutely no bearing on that
birth, eat, shit, die cycle. However, like
most artists, I find pleasure in the perverse,
and I quite like the idea of this totally
useless thing we call 'art', penetrating
daily life and somehow making a tiny impact
upon, what must surely be both the most
meaningful and simultaneously pointless
thing; human existence.
