“Sound has a power to influence people, for better or worse. At the same time, it does not give absolute power to anyone because of its difficult nature to own or control. The natural tendency of sound is to move freely through the air, and as ingenious as man is, it is always being influenced with. Sound is also characterized as something very abstract and elusive (..)”.
Sound as self-disclosure
In an unplanned experience, I can recall the days I spent recording the audio files I have shared on the Internet since 2013. The platform is concerned only with audio, whereas sometimes they use words to write a description of what the network users upload, and other times they use it in the comments section that the listeners add to those recordings.
My relationship with sound was formed at an early age, although it took different forms from the beginning, as it included variations of actions that share at their core the element of sound. The school radio was a live stage for sharing the poems that fascinated me, and the choir included group sound exercises so that our melody appeared more tuned. However, in the midst of all these activities, it never occurred to me to hear my voice and how does it sound or be able to distinguish it. My first motivation was the poem itself, to share its magnificence with others, and the effect that the words had on my feelings.
I am unable to remember how I conceived the idea to record my voice, but I remember using my sister’s BlackBerry. Just as others doubted that the voice belonged to me, I did so before them, and I decided to read to them directly as I did in my first recording. This discovery would not have been easy for me, it was like a scar that was present all the time on my body, and I needed a mirror to reveal to me what I could not see.
My voice was tested a lot, and through it I found my way to a world in which I could express myself more freely. The ability to use other people’s words and form meanings that relate to me, in one way or another, gave me a hidden, soft and effective power, just as Azar Nafisi quotes from Twain’s memoirs in her book “The Republic of Imagination”: “Expression is the thing in art. I do not care what it expresses, and I cannot tell, generally, but expression is what I worship, it is what I glory in, with all my impetuous nature.”
Tracking the sound in Arabic love songs
Sound hides within itself possibilities that go beyond our knowledge of it, and it cannot be viewed as a medium whose value is revealed by the flow of language through it.
I am eager to expand the sound to a broader extent, where a murmur is a major sign of lack of interest, while a faint sigh is capable of the furthermost of your soul. If we take a moment, we will notice that our world, even if it appears silent and hollow, has a sound that is unabashed to express itself in the presence of attention from.
For a long time, certain songs stuck in my memory that revolve around the manifestation of the beloved’s voice and his significant presence in the life of his lover.
In 1994, the Saudi artist Osama Abdulrahim sang a poet written for him by the Kuwaiti poet, Badr Buresli, the song “Saraa Al-Sout” (Voice Flow) in an album that has the same name. For 11 minutes, we can listen to all the possible forms that sound can take. In the silence of the night, a voice flowed, having an impact on the listener, causing him to poetically release a scream that turns his still night into a striking peal that proves its capability of doing anything in exchange for obtaining it. We notice other forms of sound with the beginning of the second stanza, “sharyatuk, yalli fi hamsik shajan sahir, hadithak hadhid bi-ruhi wa’ana sahir” (شريتك، ياللي في همسك شجن ساحر، حديثك هدهد بروحي وأنا ساهر/ I will give it all to have you, you who in your whisper there is an enchanting sadness, your speech soothed me to sleep, and I was fully awake). The whispering and chanting and the extent of their impact on the soul of the lover, after which Badr and Osama created an existential image in which sound plays an essential role, depicted in the sentence; “ya sahirni wala tadri, bi-soutik, bi-soutik, abtada eumri” (يا ساحرني ولا تدري، بصوتك، بصوتك، ابتدأ عمري/cluelessly, you enchanted me, and with your voice my life began).
There is a crucial factor in writing a love song like this one, which is the night, at least that is what I think. After the diligent attempts to keep it for the last possible moment, so that, “yabqaa zadi albakir” (يبقى زادي الباكر/it remains as my morning fuel) that address the absence, “walakin sawtak almasmue rahal fi al-shams!” (ولكن صوتك المسموع رحل في الشمس!/but your audible voice has gone in the sun!). Here the lover stands in confusion with the painful departure, which he cannot stop form habening, except when he whispers, “wala ‘aqdir ‘ajis alshams, wala ‘aqdir bi-don alhams!” (ولا أقدر أجيس الشمس، ولا أقدر بدون الهمس! /And I cannot touch the sun, nor can I live without the whisper!).
“Sound inhabits its own time and dissipates quickly.” When I read David Hendy’s quote by Douglas Kahn, I had a vague feeling about the immediacy of sound. I know that its physical nature is difficult to bound in a common way, meaning that we are limited in our daily lives to the moments in which sounds and conversations emerge without being able to recover them whenever we wanted, but what remains of these words in the mind, inevitably, is remembering it.
The song “Soutik Yunadini” (Your Voice Calls Me) –by the artist Mohammed Abdu, which he sang for the first time in the Zamalek Theater in 1983 and was later included in the Maazim album issued in 1987– carries connotations that cannot be overlooked. For approximately seven minutes, the music prepares us, the listeners, to hear a story that aroused the lover’s passions, in which the other part voice calls exclusively to remembering. The voice performs its miracle in carrying us to the areas of their dreams, their places, their moonlit nights. It also insists on the call, to the point where it brings the beloved from a forgotten memory to a present one, a memory that reminisces about everything, despite the past and everything that could have changed. This is how the power of sound unfolds in dissolving the bitterness of time, distance, and loss.
Implications of nature’s soundscape
From a distance, the idea of healing with nature seems romantic. A moment of lack of meaning and distraction from life led me to nature in a spontaneous way. I could feel my living presence when I stopped to notice the swish of the trees, their green leaves trying, with the help of the air, to get closer to each other, while in the background came the sounds of insects of various shapes.
Sound ecology and soundscape studies take us to other areas where scientists monitor for hours the sounds and vibrations of nature. The non-sensory connection I felt with nature was not an arbitrary matter or a state of mind in which I had arrived.
Nature whispers, ripples and speaks. In the experiment carried out by Bernie Krause in 1988, he took a sound snapshot from a place called Lincoln Meadows before starting to cut down a number of trees there, then returning to it a year later to repeat the experiment with the same precision as the previous standards. It dawned on him that something was missing in the place soundscape. Comparing the pictures before and after the cut, it does not appear to the viewer that there is a significant difference, but what about the registration scheme and the disappearance of frequencies from it? The loss of the sounds of trees that were cut down? The migration of the organisms that inhabited it? It was not just trees that were cut down from here and there, an entire life was uprooted without noticing the hidden remnant left by its hollow silence. Soundscape studies give us insight into tracking invisible changes in nature, to reveal the hidden effects of places. Bernie Krauss devoted his life to creating a huge sound archive, as he faced, at the beginning of his career, the problem of differentiating between the types of sounds recorded on his tapes, so he and his colleague Stuart Gage coined three terms:
Biophony: To describe the sounds made by microscopic to larger organisms.
Geophony: To describe sounds emanating from nature alone, such as: the rustle of the wind, and the trickling of water.
Anthropophony: To describe the sounds made by humans, and we can adapt them from music, speech, to what is issued without any meaning or what is called noise.
Krause believes that each scene is distinguished by unique sounds that differ from the sound of any other location. What is strange is that the motivation for his first trip and wandering in the forest in 1968 was for producing a music album. Krause was overcome with fear at that time, and he did not know how to listen to all this majestic sound explosion. I can imagine that moment when I listen to his albums, those sounds touched my heart and soul. It was a pure life these sounds bear, not of interest to anyone or tending to intentional distortion, it was there, not waiting for anything to happen or to happen, and I was led to listen to it.
The intersectionality of sound, the synthesis of meanings
In his experimental writing about sound, the Egyptian writer Haytham El-Wardany takes us to areas where we test the possibility of entering the social scene once, and in another exercise to escape it by focusing on the sounds emanating from the places in which we are, and on those which other people also make. I was completely captivated by these little experiences, as I have been through some of them myself, and seeing them written down in reflective, practical steps was exciting and fascinating. Among all these steps, I think of an idea that came to me during my study of sound waves, and then electromagnetism, this made me feel a connection with Haytham, as our scientific backgrounds are similar.
The idea of sound interference crawls into the instructions completely. Sound is characterized by interference and overlapping as a wave. Our auditory sense can pick up the details of many sounds, in addition to the reality that its interference enables it to create wonders on the scape. This property creates the ability to merge, without distortion, this happens when we hear a song in which string, wind, and percussion instruments harmonize at different frequencies, or while we are in the market where there are the vendors’ voices, the footsteps of people, the sounds of air conditioning fans and machines running. Despite this, our ear receives all these sound distinctions, while it is difficult for pictures to perceive this much input, this detail magnifies the fundamental characteristics of the sound.
Haytham does not just put forward an idea like this, but rather takes us to topics deep in privacy in order to engage in the experience of hearing our inner voices, verifying what they are, and distinguishing them from the voices of others. Then, a step forward in reading his book “How to Disappear,” we arrive at seven guidelines for finding meaning in empty times, by listening to the apparent silence when we are alone for a long time in a room, to begin by encouraging the reader to seize that moment of silence and record it while capturing all the possible sounds that pass through it. Further, the guidelines urge us to overcome the initial boredom that we will experience when listening to what was recorded, so that at some point, we find what used to be an arbitrary existence – the sounds of cars flowing, windows creaking, water dripping, and the phone ringing – becomes a coherent and logical sequence. The book concludes his instructions with the last point: “Repeat listening again. Notice that what you hear now is the sound of long, empty hours, and that the emergence meaning that you are gradually being assured to now is the emptiness that you used to feel, now that it has become devoid of your feelings, thoughts, and conscience. Afterwards, you will discover that emptiness itself is not the absence of all meaning, but rather your inability to understand a new meaning”.
