When in the cinema, we might hear the sound of a cloth rubbing against the skin at the same volume of a glass crashing into the ground happening in the same space. This is possible, and even more it might feel natural, thanks to the amplification of tiniest sound phenomena that is ubiquitous in the technologies of the audiovisual spectacle, even if such experience would be impossible in the realm of auditory experience outside of film and audiovisual media.

The role of loudspeakers and microphones and the way they shape the conditions of our media saturated environment is frequently unacknowledged. They do not only affect the sounds we hear, but they shape the ways we make sense of what we hear.

Sound scholar Seth Kim-Cohen points to the historical conditions that prompted a “new embodiment of sonic space” in Muddy Waters’ 1948 recording of I feel like going home. His observation is that this recording “sets a precedent for a sound condition that will determine a great deal of our implications of hearing from then on. An individual microphone is dedicated to each of the instruments: [voice, bass, guitar] or, more accurately, the guitar amplifier)”. This “new embodiment” alludes to the integration of spatial imprints which would be physically impossible to occur simultaneously – those made possible by the independent pairing of point-of-audition/microphone and instrument – as a single acoustic signal. As Kim-Cohen points out, such a form of acoustic integration becomes then prototypical – and ubiquitous – to the practice and circulation of audio recording and reproduction from then onwards. ¹

Jonathan Sterne, in his book The Audible Past accounts for the conditions in which the birth of sound reproduction technologies at the end of the nineteenth century took place. He emphasizes the transformations that, across the late nineteenth century had taken place and had altered the way listening was being performed.

New technologies , apart from expanding the range of possible sound to be produced and proliferated, were part in the development of new competences and new sensibilities. Sterne elaborates on this emergence through what he labels Audile Technique. ¹ p. 154]

As sound ceased to be necessarily anchored in a subject that produces it, new skills and modes of attending to sound ensued. These modes encompassed the ‘separation of hearing from the other senses’ as well as the ‘connection between sound, listening and rationality’ (p. 154), the ‘focus on detail’ (p.157), the possibility to conceive of a ‘reconstruction of acoustic space’ and the consolidation of a ‘private acoustic space’ (p.160). The disappearance of the subject as a necessary condition to which sound was attributed was thus essential for what Sterne also labels the shift towards a tympanic paradigm, in which the focus of technology moved towards the ear, prompting further alterations in the ways in which attention to sound developed later on.

Sound can play different roles as it takes part in diverse listening practices. Such practices are inherent to the material and collective contexts in which they occur, defining the way sound creates an awareness of one’s own environment. In her book “Aurality – Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia” sound studies scholar and musicologist Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier exposes how listening is entwined with singular cosmologies and modes of being in the world: “before the question how do people perceive the environment in auditory terms comes the question of how the very boundaries between personhood and the environment are.” Thus: “a theory of sound implies a listener, [it] imagines a listener and an idea of reception of sound.” ¹

In Ochoa Gautier’s analysis of the sounding and listening practices of the Bogas – the rowers that traversed the riverine connection of the caribbean atlantic and the Amazon through the territory later known as Colombia – she recounts how the dairy testimonies of the European colonial settlers-explorers who were being transported by the bogas from the Caribbean Atlantic to the Amazonian regison, the bogas’s expression was understood as a mixture of language, music and “the imitation of the sound of tigers, whistling of the serpent, the shout of the parrot and howling dogs”.

Ochoa Gautier, though, makes the point that the role of the vocal utterances produced by the bogas was inaccurately appraised by the colonial explorers. A clash occurs between two different modes in which listening is performed. The listening of the Europeans was incompatible with the logic that articulated voice and listening in the cosmology of the Bogas. While for the Europeans the voice was to be conceived as a locus of subjective expression, which rendered their own way of comprehending the “imitation of animals”, for the Bogas the voice is understood otherwise. The practice of vocalization of animal sounds, rather than “representing an entity”, was to be understood in their cosmology as a manifestation of the “locus of a transpersonal self”. Ochoa Gautier develops on this:

“Voice permits the “sharing of certain attributes” (Sahlins 2013, 31) between beings where relations between entities are conceived as constituting a “mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2013). Voice, rather than a mediation between worlds is “a medium of mutuality” (Sahlins 2013, 54) in the constitution of a notion of a distributed self. […] What the bogas would be doing in envoicing such multiplicity is to invoke the transformational potential of becoming that all envoicement entails. It has been said that the exchange of pronouns between beings or parts of the body is a method to name “a transpersonal existence” (Sahlins 2013). If it is so with pronouns, it is even more so with the sonority of animal voices, as vocalizing them implies giving presence to different parts of that transpersonal being and/or to the mutuality established between beings.” ²

Ochoa Gautier provides here a prime example of how sound might take on different roles as it takes part in different forms of engaging with one’s environment.

Musicologist Daniel Chua makes a case on his book Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning for the entwined nature of the birth of the opera and the development of stage machinery.

The use of scenes “in perspective”, deployed for the first time as part of Florentine opera, is one of the elements that Chua accounts for as the conditions for producing a listening stance: “cosmic infinity has been replaced by the infinity of the vanishing point which puts the human eye at the centre of perception. With this monocular vision, music no longer looks down upon humanity but is looked upon as an object […] what is extended through the eye of the prince beyond the backdrop is the stage machinery” (p. 45-46). This practice “created the epistemological structures in which music could be objectified on stage for the perspectival gaze of the subject.”

On the articulation of opera and stage, he elaborates:

How does this optic regime work? There are two stages to the process: a backstage and a frontstage. The backstage was cluttered with machines. The rituals of magic that imitate the invisible forces of the supernatural world through the descent of deities from clouds and the flying of furies from the pit of hell were controlled with an Oz-like wizardry from behind the scenes. […] For all its magic, opera is a machine world of cause (backstage) and effect (frontstage). So upstage there might be an ancient cosmos with rotating spheres and ethereal beings in full flight, but the magic is thoroughly modern, purely instrumental and entirely human. ¹

Chua argues that the emergence of a notion of absolute music was inherent in the conditions created by the new-born opera. The practice of staging that opera inaguturated informed the kind of attention that symphonic music would later on rely upon. In opera the role of text in monody “makes audible the disembodied bubble of the ‘invisible interior’ that is the modern subject” (p. 35).

This short film was a test for Edison’s “Kinetophone” project, the first attempt in history to record sound and moving image in synchronization. This was an experiment by William Dickson to put sound and film together either in 1894 or 1895.

Our engagement with the world is saturated by sound. Quite often, sound is associated with the most ethereal realities: that of song and lyricism or the vaporous ephemerality of illusions. But sound is also a sensitive layer through which we experience the proximity of a body, the harsh surface of walls around us or the vastness or oppressing nature of a place. Sound is a material reality whose experience is deeply ingrained in our engagement with our surroundings.

Since sound is always an expansive phenomena which unfolds inherent to the vibration of a mass (of air, or other materials), it is not possible to “locate” sounds in the same way that we locate points in a diagram. The way we experience the spatial and material qualities of sound are inherent to the ways we make sense of the coupling of our ears with a vibrating mass. The material nature of the acoustic is often inaccurately addressed by applying categories born out of the visual domain or diagrammatic models aimed to identify physical objects.

The point is not to oppose the auditory and the visual, but rather to acknowledge different regimes of the sensorial that apply to both realms. As cinema scholar Laura Marks states “Cultural traditions that do not separate vision so radically from the body have less need to deconstruct and reimagine visuality” ¹ Sound Theory (The Clouds) explores the material qualities of sound reproduction technologies – not hidden as a seemingly anonymous screen. The spectator is prompted to make sense of their diverse material qualities and the adjustments that listening needs to perform to engages with the technical infrastructures of sound reproduction.

Focus is an installation problematizing the ambiguous materiality of the audible. ¹

This work creates a conflict between the recreation of spatial impressions enabled by sound and the embodied interaction with the loudspeaker devices. In wandering across the room the listener crosses perceptual thresholds: points where the audible transforms from the re-enaction of a fictional space to a nearly-tactile experience. Listening is rendered as a constant process of adaptation, attuning to the material conditions inherent in the circuit of audio reproduction.

In her book “Godard and Sound”, cinema scholar Albertine Fox explores the notion of “Acoustic Spectatorship”, and elaborates on the way filmmaker Jean Luc Godard pushed the boundaries of this domain. As such, it prompts to consider further Godard not only as a filmmaker but also - as has also been proposed through other perspectives - as a more widely encompassing media artist for whom the dimension of the acoustic renewed the ways to think our experience of the audiovisual.

In the theatre distances are not neutralized, they are rather ‘transfixed’. That is because even when in the theatre a table is a table, the table is there not to fulfil a table-function but, fundamentally, to be sensorially experienced. The act of gazing, listening or “touching at a distance” becomes more important than the real distance that separates us from the table.

This transfixing act occurs across stages and screens from the Greek amphitheatre to the digital surfaces of mobile phones. They can be addressed as technical infrastructures where perception is modulated. In both cinema and music rely on codes that steer how the spectator listens – how sound is to be attended to and how the spectator locates itself in relation to sound.

Musical sound (in its habitual form) detaches our attention from the “material reality” of sound production: we are prompted to hear the pitch produced by the instrument and not the effort of the person doing it. On the other hand, cinema can ‘fictionalize’ incidental sound: we hear noises as an imaginary ‘out of screen’ field in the mind of a fictional character thanks to cinema’s montage operations. Each of these disciplines inform protocols that modulate how we listen. It is the way we rely on the technologies we use that shapes our perception.
As French philosopher Bernard Stiegler states, as “we perceive, most of the time, through the intermediary prostheses of perception”, the synthesis that we as subjects perform “stems from knowledge [we have] of the technical conditions of the image-object´s production”.

Alessandra Buccheri in her book “The Spectacle of Clouds” traces the entwined history of cloud paintings in renaissance chapels and the use of cloud machinery on the theatre stage.
Buccheri notes that the ubiquitous uses of clouds in renaissance painting was deeply influenced by the moving clouds as stage props used in religious spectacle of late medieval times. She argues that it was “stagecraft that exerted a greater influence on painting, and not the other way around”.

Buccheri underlines how the theatrical context in which cloud machinery was developed was ubiquitous in early renaissance, coupled to the use of “lighting, chanting, music” which enhanced the intensity of the illusion. This prompted “religious theatre, from the fourteenth century onwards” to become “a useful model to look at for painters who wanted to represent a seemingly real three-dimensional heaven”.

In Florentine art, the use of clouds in a theatrical fashion in sculptures and paintings portraying the Annunciation, the Assumption and Ascension, can possibly be traced to the significant development of the cloud machinery. This phenomenon became striking from the fourteenth century onwards, when Florentine art moved from a symbolic to a more overtly narrative approach. According to some historians, it was because of this new narrative approach that artists, searching for a new language, turned to theatre to find new ideas and spatial solutions. ¹

In the context of both Cinema and Music performance, listening is informed by the spectatorial protocols of the theatre. Music has for a long time been integrated with the theatre house, since its affiliation with the birth of the opera. On the other hand, as cinema scholar Morten Meldgaard claimed “moving pictures only became Cinema when they encountered architecture, [when] the movie-house [became] a spatio-temporal construct for the social venue of cinematic viewing”. ¹ .

Sound Theory (The Clouds) explores theatre as a staging infrastructure that focuses and synchronizes the attention of spectators. In a world where the manipulation of the senses by ubiquitous computing reigns, this project begs the question: how do audiovisual infrastructures inform our engagement with the world around us?

From the cinema screen to the realm of online platforms, the protocols of synchronization of the performative, the visual and the aural regularly sustain what we acknowledge as present.
Sound Theory (The Clouds) challenges the steady nature of this perceptual synchronization. The coupling of the visual, material and auditory is dissasembled. Visual images are disrupted in their capacity to represent, as they become a locus of attention, a sensorial condition that modulates the performance of the auditory.