Aural Practices

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.