In the late fall of 2023, Brett Mommersteeg and Andrew Gilbert organized an experimental workshop entitled “Sounding Berlin.” The aim was to utilise different sensory modalities and different tools (recordings, drawings, text, photographs) to gather various traces of the sonic, and to experiment with ways of assembling “apparatuses for atmospheric attunements” (Choy 2018). The workshop was motivated by an interest in how sound “overflows” these individual modalities, in how the incomplete traces from differing modalities can be patched together, and the different soundscapes that can be assembled together in one site.
And so, on 1 November, a group of about 16 participants gathered at Alexanderplatz and teams of four were formed, with each person in the team taking a documentary format: photography, sound, writing and drawing. The groups were then given instruction envelopes that laid out a series of steps that would be carried out over the three hours of the event. Each group had to locate a sonic event or sonic object that they thought reveals something particular about urban life in Berlin.
Here are links to the instructions for writing, audio recording, photography, and drawing. Feel free to use, adapt, or modify these as you see fit!
As is often the case, moving through the instructions took longer than anticipated, and Stage 4 ended up being far too limited. That said, even in the short time allotted, each group produced a rich collection of materials for their chosen sonic events: a street crossing (where one group sought to capture the cyclical choreographed nature of urban mobility and movement), a construction site for a winter market (where one group sought to capture the mobility of infrastructure, its constant putting up/taking down, appearance and disappearance), a kitschy staging of Berlin’s history (and the tourists that it sought to conjure and capture), and a train platform. At the end of this post you can see or listen to some of the artefacts produced by each group.
For the train platform group, Andrew did the sound recording and it was difficult to choose which snippets to share, particularly when thinking about what they might exemplify about urban life in Berlin. In the end, he chose a few different clips that he thought demonstrated the particular combination of intimacy and anonymity that you find in spaces of mass transportation in Berlin. The first clip contained different groups of people speaking in at least four different languages, and the second was two young women discussing how easy it is to miss important details of village life (who is getting together or breaking up, who is doing what drugs) when one leaves on vacation for a short time. It seemed that the general sonic atmosphere of the platform, of constant announcements, trains arriving and departing, people speaking in any number of different languages, all combined to create the feeling of privacy-in-public, the sense that one can share intimate details without risking the usual social consequences. This helps explain how easy it often is to (over)hear things that would otherwise not be shared in the company of strangers or other public groups. We all participate (or conspire) in this by sonically filtering out—or un-listening to—what we might be hearing right next to us. In fact, this might be described as part of an ethics of privacy-in-public along the circuits of mass transit, something that became conspicuous when recording these conversations, and again when deciding whether to make these recordings available here (we decided against it).
When these recordings were combined with the other independently-produced documentations in the group—(1) the narrative text, which was read out loud and combined statements of what was being seen with a performance of what they sounded like, as well as with (2) the photo selection, which included a photo of two people standing very close to each other inside a train, but looking in opposite directions, alongside (3) the final drawing, which included visualizations of many of the sound items that were voiced in the narration—it clearly enriched, deepened, and performed the point being made with the sound selection.
In another reflection from the construction site group, a participant responsible for “writing” noted that in order to capture traces of sonic events as they were unfolding, he had to be “all body, ears and eyes and pen, oriented towards the situation.” And then when it came time to sort through his notes and create something that might be of interest to others, he had to be “all author, oriented towards an audience, manufacturing a narrative.” One challenge he shared was how to write down words in the Brandenburg dialect when no standard exists. He also found it hard to find the right words to do justice to the other sounds unfolding as part of the construction site as a sonic event. Others noted that there was often a tension between documenting the source of sound vs documenting the sound itself.
This matched some of the observations made by members of the train platform group about the forces shaping and limiting what could be done with the different media.
The member who was writing observed that when she performed the sounds of things in her narrative, like the brakes of a train slowing down or a rolling suitcase, she voiced them using conventional sound-words in German; another group member, a native Spanish speaker, heard the same sounds but used different conventions—sound-words—to represent them in drawing. It became clear at that moment that interpretation is already going on at the point of note-taking, whether with words or drawing – no sonic phenomenon is unmediated. Also, the choice of what to record sonically was in part visually inspired, but there was no way to easily represent that with the medium.
The participant who was drawing noted how difficult it was to document sounds that happened once and quickly, and found herself orienting more to sonic phenomena that were repetitive or had a sonic duration more amenable to drawing. The group collectively noted that different media afforded different representational strategies – with no equipment to mix together different recorded sounds, it was difficult to represent the sonic density that exemplified the point about intimacy and anonymity, while drawing or writing allowed for a visual layering that could better represent that density.
Another group member noted that once the sound recording and the photographs were combined, they came to inform one another, allowing her to imagine the platform as the site of active sonic events, but also of tuning in and out the different sounds.
Perhaps most impressive to the organizers of the workshop was how much of this rich documentation and reflection was accomplished in such a short amount of time. Also interesting was how ready we were to recognise the limits of what we could do alone, and how this in turn opened us up to the advantages in ethnographic thickness that we could achieve while working collaboratively. It may be that such collaborative collectives are well suited to the study of sound, in part because this “object of knowledge” challenges authorial claims; it reminds us that the world overflows our engagements with it. Indeed, for a discipline in which the lone ethnographer is still the dominant figure for research practice, and slow research the privileged norm, our workshop suggested there might be value in imagining complementary practices and norms – for instance, the formation of collectives that could respond rapidly to unfolding events and produce ethnographically rich research data and analysis in a much shorter period of time. And this also might lend itself to the development of what Kathleen Stewart identified as “weak theory,” an approach that does not “judge the value of analytic objects or to somehow get their representation “right,” but rather wonders “where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them as a potential or resonance” (2008: 73).
Citations:
Choy, Timothy. 2018. “Tending to Suspension. Abstraction and Apparatuses of Atmospheric Attunement in Matsutake Worlds.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology. 62(4): 54-77
Stewart, Kathleen 2008. “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World.” Journal of Folklore Research, 45(1): 71-82
