1995
If we think about sound in the everyday, for the most part we have two senses. It's not only our ears working and listening, but it's our ear and our eye as a team constantly looking at our environment aurally and visually to determine what's happening in it. I was always impressed with and I think probably everybody here knows of Cage's experience in the anechoic chamber, this shock of suddenly losing this dimension. The only way we can really experience how this interaction between eye and ear works is in fact to spend a day without hearing, to wear earplugs from the time you get up until the time you go to sleep. Most of us are much more conscious about the eye and how we perceive our environment with the eye. We don't realize that the ear is an equal partner, and without it the eye collapses in many respects. The ear also has a very special role compared to the eye; it hears around corners, it hears for long distances, we can hear things that we can't see, we can usually see things that we can hear. So everyday sound then becomes what we hear, the sound images that we form.
At first we may think this is rather primitive, but if we think back through our daily lives and think about the sounds that we identify - I was always impressed by the personal template that most people have of the sounds of their own car. One week before it will break down you start hearing a sound, but if you try to tell a mechanic about it he can't hear it. You're the only one who can hear it, because this is your car and you hear it every day. It's a very highly developed sense.
Of course the most highly developed sense of hearing we have is understanding spoken language. As we were saying this morning, within the first eighteen months, the latest scientific theory is that a large part of the brain is devoted to identifying the phoneme sounds of our mother tongue. A baby can distinguish between a phoneme in Chinese and a phoneme in French without any problem, and what his real problem is is throwing away the distinctions so he only hears the phonemes of his real language. And this whole part of the mind after eighteen months gets thrown away or it gets used for something else. That's why it's hard for us to learn phonetically the sounds of another language after a certain age.
We also don't have anywhere near the amount of knowledge about psychoacoustics as we do for visual psychology. It's a very early field partly because we've never had anything stable. We've only been able to record sound - so we only have the exact same stimulus - for about sixty years. We're kind of in an infancy.
But to get back to the everyday I think we have to say that as animals we are social species; we live in communities of various sizes. Although each of us thinks of his own life as a universe, a trajectory of thoughts, actions, activities, few of us realize that each of us has a different one. We are all on different trajectories at the same time; we are all running down pathways. What community means is when we intersect other people's pathways. We all find a balance between independent action and interaction with the people around us. We could even say that community is defined by this intersection of paths.
If we look at early communities, why they formed, perhaps, it was for mutual support, for survival, to protect themselves from other people, other animals, to gather at a source of food, to have other members of the species around to procreate with, and I also believe on a spiritual side to communicate with other people, this face-to-face communication of spoken language. I think fairly early in communities we also developed a kind of broadcasting. We needed to transmit messages to other members of the community at the same time. Everybody knows we had town criers at a certain time who when there was something to tell everybody ran through the town telling people. Of course one of the major evolutions in Europe in terms of sound signals was the bell, the church bell, which was much more than just telling people to come to church but it was a giver of information, a teller of life and death. And it also by being a source of information limited the size of its community to the geographical space it could cover. If you lived outside of the range where you could hear the church bell, you weren't part of the community; you couldn't have this intersection.
If we look at the present, the needs are quite a bit different. Do we move into cities for protection? No, it's safer outside. We don't need to be proximate to other people to get food. As our ideas about transportation and technology about transportation have developed, we've made a tremendous expansion in what a community can be physically. In fact for many people who travel a lot, like me, I think we visualize the globe as one city with a subway system of airplanes. The idea of distance being measured not in geographical distance but in air time and cost, air fare, and if we start to look at the world this way then we realize that in terms of cost Paris is closer to New York. You can buy a cheaper ticket from Paris to New York than you can buy in many cases from Paris to a smaller city. So we build one large city of many large cities. In terms of procreation we don't have to travel at all anymore; we can procreate by Fed Ex.
This community, this communication in the community, has also transformed itself with mediums like broadcasting and telephony. Broadcasting is in fact a replacement of the church bell; it's one voice telling many people something. The telephone is interactive; it's people conversing among themselves. We can extend it to television which again is one thing shaping the minds of many versus the internet which is many people interacting. In fact television puts us in one global place; it makes one global community. In America one can see two hundred million people changing their minds overnight depending on which soap opera they heard the night before. The internet of course is the first thing to challenge the power of this, and it forms the potential not to live in one community but to find a number of communities to live in simultaneously - another number of groups of people to intersect. I think we can say at the present that what we have now is a result of development towards these basic needs being satisfied without being in physical proximity. The intersection no longer has to be physical. In fact we might be able to say that the essence of a community is now how it communicates - community defined by communication.
I want to talk a little bit about a property of sound which we all use and which is actually the major property that I use when I make a sound work. In speech we have phonemic sounds, the sounds of the words themselves, but superimposed on top of this phonemic aural language is another language of intonation. It's a language that hasn't been studied very much, again I think because we haven't been able to record it for a long time. Most linguists study the written word, not the spoken word. But this other language which is not made up of discrete words but is a continuum of emphasis, tone, in fact carries a huge amount of information. We use it to interpret the words; we also use it to test the words. It's a language that goes alongside facial expression, so we use it to tell what the person really means or whether he's telling the truth. If we think about it, it's also a language that's cross-cultural and even cross-species; we can speak to animals in tone of voice, that's what they understand. Music is the only place where we manipulate sound character consciously. It's outside of melody and rhythm. It's perhaps in the area of orchestration, the art of mixing tone colors. In the past hundred years we have developed it to quite a fine art, and Mr. Schoenberg certainly added it as an element to musical language. But in music it serves as an embellishment to the codified musical language we have; it reinforces established meanings of melody and harmony. In everyday sounds, this place where we're forming images of our environment with the cooperation of our eye and ear, we ignore sound character. We are constantly just asking our eyes and ears, what is it?
So this idea of sound character or this word that I'm beginning to define seems to be always there. It's there in speech; it's there in music; it's there in our everyday sounds. But in each case it's a balance between codified and uncodified. This idea of sound character, as I said, is really a thread that moves through all my work with sound. I feel it's the fundamental dimension. For me it's the essence of what sound means to us. But in order to use it we have to isolate it from the codified, to move outside of musical conventions. But even if we do that, if we are still in the realm of time we don't escape. I'm interested in its extraction, the extraction of this essence, and allowing it to stand on its own. Up until recently we haven't had very many ways of manipulating it. We have the voice; we have the orchestra. But certainly within the last ten years we've gained enough shaping tools for sound that we can do practically anything we want with it. I'm interested in exploring its cross-cultural meaning. It's a parameter which has many dimensions. Right now these dimensions are unnamed, and I hope they stay that way. To deconstruct is to destruct.
The other word that was in the title was 'intervention' into the everyday, and there's a group of my works which are really the topic of this talk which I call moment works. No matter how abstract our community becomes, how much it becomes only a matter of communication, we are all inhabitants of our bodies and our bodies have to be somewhere. I feel there's a need to balance the possibility of abstract communities with the physical ones that we all inhabit. The church bell shows us that sound can be a unifier; it tells the same message to a large group of people at the same time who are not in the same place. Sound itself has a kind of immediate presence that vision, what we see, doesn't have. We can stand back from what we see; we can look at it. But sound actually touches us. In order to hear, we have a sound wave that's coming out of my mouth touching a very intimate part of your ear. It's a very different kind of sense. Sound signals in communities are an element in common to all who hear them. The fact that a signal occurs at one time draws people back into physical proximity even though they're in separate places. As I said before, television and the internet are certainly other means of communication; but because they're electronic we're cut off from the kind of touch that sound itself can give us, and we're also cut off from all the knowledge that our experience of our lives gives us about sound or gives us about the environment through sound.
I have a story which is the strongest illustration of the power of sound to unify that I have ever seen. Last year I was in the Tyrol, and people were taking me around in a car to think about where I might do a work. We went down south and through Italy and came up in a valley in Austria that's only accessible through Italy and is a dead end; so you can only go into Italy and drive back up it. We kept driving up in the mountains, and the roads got smaller and smaller, and finally we got to a farmhouse. We got out and started talking to this man there. And I started talking about sound and things progressed and at one point he stopped and said: 'Do you know that we have a very old story around here? In fact this mountain barrier between us and the rest of Austria is not very wide; it's only as the crow flies three kilometers. And just on the other side of this mountain is another town about the size of ours. And the story is that if you climb the mountain there's one particular point where you can hear the bells of both villages simultaneously'. So it's one point where you can be in both towns at once.
Why is this an important story to these people? It's because of this idea that indeed it's a miracle that you could bridge this very high mountain with sound. It led me to an idea to reverse the situation. If instead of making that a listening point we'd placed a sound at that point, of course it would be heard by both villages. It would no longer be a myth; one could make a sound once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year. At the moment of that sound, those two places would be unified.
The idea of course isn't just to make any sound. Our development of sound signals from the town crier - I don't know whether we chose him on the basis of his voice, probably the basis of whether he could talk clearly or loudly - the bell itself has gone through a tremendous technological evolution but it's still a piece of metal. For the past thirty years I've worked with electronics as a material because it is really the first material that we can shape sound with. There are some dangers; if you don't control it it can shape you rather than you shaping it - technology, I mean. But essentially my proposal was to build a sound character very carefully not in my studio but by ear from both sides of the mountain throughout the whole range of where this sound would be heard.
The piece is called 'border bell'. It's really a form rather than a work; the sound character of each one determines what the work is or is the content of the work. But it certainly is broader than a mountain range; it can cross any border. It can join two separate peoples across a border. So this idea of a sound which occurs at a moment and unifies is the form, the character, of this idea of moment work.
But actually the ideas started much earlier. In the seventies I became curious about the disappearance of sound rather than the appearance of sound. All sound signals we have are the appearance of a sound. What is the difference between something appearing and disappearing?
Psychologically we sense change; we ignore the status quo. The status quo is old information. In order to survive we need to know what's happening, what's new, what's unknown. So certainly we can cause a moment by introducing a sound, making a sound appear, but we could also cause a moment by making a sound disappear.
I began on a very small scale; I built an alarm clock that woke you up by making a sound disappear. Essentially it was a sound that grew very gradually over a period of ten minutes. Because it grew so gradually you didn't notice its appearance in your sleep, but when it disappeared suddenly that change which you sensed woke you up. And I made a few of these and gave them to my friends, and they worked. I mean, it certainly doesn't get you up if you have a hangover and you don't want to get out of bed. But if you want to be woken up it gives you enough of a signal to wake up, and it's much nicer than a screaming bell or a nasty buzz. Mainly I did it not as a practical invention but just so that I could get a feeling for how people reacted to this idea of disappearance. Sleep is very basic; when you talk to people about how they wake up, how they sleep, if you give them something that is the first event in their day, they have something to say about it.
The first large scale realization of this idea was at the Whitney Museum in New York in its sculpture garden in 1983. Although it was large scale, it was still a model. It was in a museum context, and I first decided to try the idea by not adding a sound but recoloring sound that was already there and very, very gradually over a period of ten minutes introducing the recoloration of the live sound into the place and at one instant pulling away the coloration and exposing the sound again in a new way.
The only work which has been realized on a city scale was in 1989 at the Kunsthalle in Bern where for a distance of one kilometer around the Kunsthalle I added a half-hourly sound character, a texture of sound, a continuous sound, which at every half hour disappeared. It's a very interesting exercise for someone who has shaped sound for his whole life as I have; it's working on the other face of the coin. It's shaping sound to shape a silence.
Max Neuhaus