Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science

Abstract

the oxford handbook of sound studies composition performed or recorded under water in settings ranging from swimming pools to the ocean, with playback unfolding above water or beneath. Composers of underwater music are especially curious about scientifi c accounts of how sound behaves in water and eager to acquire technologies of subaqueous sound production. We can learn much about how the underwater domain has been made sonically perceptible by attending to how composers adapt their practice to scientifi c language and technique in ways both rigorous and fanciful. We can learn how sound has been abstracted from the water medium to reveal and produce resources imagined as musical. We can track how technologies of underwater audition are often adjusted to deliver aesthetic experiences in line with the way composers imagine submerged sound should sound; how, to take one example, the notion of water as sublimely immersive can be reinforced in compositions that make use of hydrophonic listening and playback. We can also sometimes discern a querying of dominant thinking about the symbolism of underwater sound. * 1 One tradition in the history of sound tells us the ocean was once taken to be a place of silence (thus, in 1953, Jacques Cousteau's book The Silent World). Auguste and Jacques Piccard the same year described travel two miles down in their bathyscaphe Trieste as surrounded by the "quiet of death" (Long 1953 , quoted in Schwartz, forthcoming). That tone had been set in 1896, when Kipling wrote in his poem "The Deep-Sea Cables," "There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep" (resonating with early nineteenth-century theories of the deep as a lifeless "azoic zone"). However, there has existed a more sonorous imagination of the sea-think of singing mermaids and sea monsters. In Charles Kingsley's 1863 novel, The Water-Babies , the boy protagonist, approaching a submarine volcano, comes "to the white lap of the great Sea-mother, ten thousand fathoms deep. .. aware of a hissing and a roaring, and thumping, and a pumping, as of all the steam engines of the world at once" (quoted in Kaharl 1989 , xiii). As we will hear, the underwater world was, even in its fi rst scientifi c manifestations, full of sound-even music-echoed in the poetic descriptions such vibration often called forth. Such soundful seas found expression in Romantic musical efforts to evoke underwater realms, which bequeathed a store of symbolism to later music meant to be realized under water. Notions of the immersive and sublime continue to saturate audio work. However, listening closely to such work, as this chapter does, also reveals how underwater music tracks shifting perceptions of the sea (from a space of cold-war mystery to a commons imperiled by global warming), changing ways of inhabiting swimming pools (primarily implicating gender), and fashions of connecting sound, art, * I thank Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch for inviting me to the Sound Studies workshop. Participants in Maastricht provided invaluable comments, par...

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