Noise (4)
Transports
Steven Connor
Transmitted BBC Radio 3, 27 February, 1997. 
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If sound always occupies time, it also has a strong and particular relation to space. The experience of sound always installs us in particular spaces. We become aware of distances, volumes and limits through the experience of hearing. If vision gives us the important information we need about our environment, it is hearing that tells us what it feels like to be in that environment. As Walter Ong has put it: if vision places us in front of the world, hearing places us in its midst, which is perhaps no more than to say that it places us as such.
Curiously, hearing is a way of touching and being touched by one’s space. In intense experiences of listening, hearing cooperates with touch to recall the eyeless belongingness of intrauterine life, when we are given our own shape by the shape of that which surrounds and accommodates us, and early infant life when we are bathed and caressed as much by voices as by hands and fingers, in what the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu has described as an `auditory envelope’.
Paradoxically, it is because of this power to bring about the sense of intimate physical belonging that sound is also utopian (u-topian, literally of no place). Because sound can put us in spaces it can also take us out of them, replacing actual and particular spaces with remembered or imagined spaces. We are, in truth, transported by sound.
All of this is intensified and complicated by the technological capacity to separate sounds from their originating source. The sound which transports us has already been transported. Our power to transport ourselves with sound is reinforced by the power to transport sound itself. The sound which is transmitted from place to place, with the telephone, the radio, the loudspeaker, the tape-recorder, itself has the effect of transmitting places and allowing places to permeate each other. Somebody listening to a Walkman is in another place, since they have a purely visual relationship with their actual environment. The irritation induced by the Walkman is an irritation at knowing you have been reduced to the condition of a ghost for this person, that they inhabit a space of a superior richness and density to that of the real world in which you are moving. The same goes for the mobile phone; when the private space of listening refuses to be accommodated with the little nooks and pockets of official listening with which we provide them – the phone booth – the effect is to invade and shred shared social space.
The transportability of sound, especially in the modern world, in which sounds are so readily transmitted from place to place, is emphasised by the powerful association between sound and the experiences of movement and being moved. For we are surrounded by travelling sounds, and by the sounds of travel. And when we ourselves are in physical motion, it is above all an experience of sound that we undergo. The modern self is not a fixed point inspace, on whicb stimuli and experiences converge: it is a membrane through which noises, voices and musics travel.
Our world is full of sounds on the move, the sound of movement, and the sound of machines for moving things and people around. These sounds actually impart to us the dissolution of space into time, into movements of time. Close your eyes in a high-rise building in a Western city, and you hear the sound of space itself coming and going with the sound of the innumerable itineraries being threaded through the space of the city.
But when we are ourselves in motion, sounds have an entirely different quality and meaning. The steady growl of a car engine, the level, obliterating hush inside an aeroplane, all aim to install and keep us in a secure, timeless space; these sedative sounds embody the sense of a space that holds and contains us rather than a space that we traverse. Hence our extreme sensitivity to small variations of sound in these contexts, to sounds that break the continuity: the heart-stopping clunk as the undercarriage retracts, the irritating, ominous, indescribable and unignorable sound of something about to go wrong with the car.
The noise of our passage through space is angry and purposeful; we hear the roar and snarl of engines bent on the defeat and annihilation of space. The noise with which we surround ourselves during travel is an annihilating quietness. Sound signals movement: but when we are ourselves on the move, we need sounds that conceal the fact of movement, sounds that deny sequence, that give us back solidity and stillness, the experience of secure and immovable space. We hunger for sound that we can shelter in.
When we travel, we derive information from our eyes, from notice- boards and screens: but it is the experience of sound that contours and consoles us as we move. Sound provides the shaping, substantiating solace that moving creatures need. Think of the hallucinogenic strangeness of a long car journey without the experience of sound; or look around a railway station or an airport and see the nervously vigilant trance that has descended upon all the travellers. They are all listening to that murmuring emulsion of sound, compounded of all the sounds of rush and hurry, mechancial and human, and the unpredictable, unignorable and often unintelligible announcements of all kinds. Travel is a form of bodily listening, an attention to the insistent but inaudible underspeech of human and inhuman voices that pervade us. In travel, we move in and through noises on the move. In the era of the mobile phone, it is not just the apparatus for transmitting the voice that is portable: it is the voice itself Рthe Greek phon̩ Рthat moves, from human beings to things, and back again. Voices are on the move. Nothing speaks reliably from where it is. Generalised ventriloquism, with no dummy, and no ventriloquist.
But the address that we crave from the sounds of the world, the voices we try to construe from noise, are hard to make out in the sounds of transport. The noises of coming and going, approaching and receding, are a conversation that the world conducts with itself. At times, we seem merely to be overhearing this coming and going, whose sound itself so incessantly comes and goes. The noises of travel are more than the exhaust or residue left behind by mechanically-effected movement. They are part of the immaterialisation of the world, its transformation into pure travel, pure passage; the dissolution of solid places and spaces into the world of noises.
Perhaps this finds a parallel in the deepening association between dance and music in our century. Dance music demands and itself acts out the body in movement, elliding the distinction between hearing and movement. Dance music is a form of telekinesis, of movement at a distance. Twentieth-century dance forms, both avant-garde and popular, have attempted to extend and dissolve the forms, boundaries and limits of the human body, as classically conceived, insistently increasing the noise-to-signal ratio. The sustained assault upon tonality and the contemporary ascendancy of percussive over melodic patterning participates in this strong association between pure noise and pure movement. At the same time, music and dance have explored states of extreme slowness; the shifting masses of sound characteristic of the music of György Ligeti or contemporary ambient music testify for a desire for the reassuring solidity of sound, for a return of the secure aural space which is so energetically torn apart in the transports of contemporary dance and music.