The Sound of Fear

There was a fascinating programme on Radio 4 this week, The Sound of Fear, presented by Sean Street. It examined the way in which certain sounds, or indeed the absence of sound, can induce a fearful response, and the manner in which artists have used the disconcerting quality of certain sounds to uncanny or terrifying effect. Freud’s essay on the uncanny, or unheimlich emerges as a central point of reference, with its exploration of disturbing encounters with unknown or strange phenomena in literature. These often take place within an otherwise familiar and comfortable domestic setting (heimlich can roughly be translated as homely), and the novel elements are disturbing partly because of their unfamiliarity. Sound researcher Marcus Leadley makes the distinction between sounds which are distorted or warped in some way, but which still have an identifiable and familiar source, and therefore merely produce a sensation of disorientation; and those whose source is unknown, and whose unfamiliarity creates a fearful apprehension of the uncanny. Freud’s essay doesn’t pay much attention to the role played by sound in evoking a sense of dread or terror, and the story upon which is at the heart of his analysis, ETA Hoffmann’s The Sandman, specifically revolves around the fear of losing one’s sight. Unsurprisingly, Freud interprets the idea of eyeballs being torn from their sockets as symbolically relating to a castration complex. David Toop, in his book Sinister Resonance (the title taken from a Henry Cowell piece, played on the strings inside the body of the piano), subjects the story to a thorough sonic scrutiny, showing how sounds without identifiable origin provide the most unsettling intimation that the known world of the heimlich has been invaded, tainted with something other. Toop adds perceptive comments and personal observations throughout the programme, the valuable insights of someone whose innate aural sensitivity has led him to a lifetime as a listener, writer and musician intently immersed in the worlds of sound.

I sense that the idea for the programme may have originated in a reading of his book, and in particular the lengthy chapter Chair Creaks, But No One Sits There. In it, Toop examines the uncanny as manifested through sound in supernatural fiction. He writes about Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, with its full dynamic range building up from the microsounds of busy scrabbling and half-heard whispers to an unbearable, deafening pounding; Charles Dickens’ Chimes: A Goblin Story, with its empty nocturnal church as a sounding chamber for the elements; Edgar Allan Poe’s poems and stories, in particular The Tell-Tale Heart, with its regular beat pulsing to the insistent rhythms of unassuaged guilt (the murder in the story is occasioned by the narrator’s hatred of the old man’s cold, staring eye, ocular and aural terrors once more interlinked); Three MR James stories which involve sound as a principal, premonitory or summoning element – A Neighbour’s Landmark, Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book and Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You (perhaps the scariest of all ghost stories); and Algernon Blackwood’s tales of hypersensitivity to eerie sound (or ‘eary’ sound, as Toop quotes Nicholas Royle punningly describing it) A Case of Eavesdropping, The Empty House and The Listener. He notes that, given the importance of sound to the creation of the haunted atmospheres, immanent with uncanny presence, which suffuse Blackwood’s stories, it is appropriate that the psychic detective he created to confront the various supernatural manifestations which he is called upon to investigate is named John Silence.

In the programme, the emphasis is laid more on film than on literature, a concession to a predominantly visual oriented culture, which is a bias the book sets out to counterbalance. Toop talks about the way in which horror films often begin with an anomalous sound, an indication of the presence of something which shouldn’t be there, presaging the onset of a disruptive force. He writes of the powerful use of sound in Robert Wise’s 1963 film of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting, and the bungling of the 1999 remake, with its explicit visual manifestation of the uncanny, entirely withheld by Wise and Jackson, through banally emphatic cgi. He also cites The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s 1961 adaptation of Henry James’ novella, in which a piano is played by an invisible hand in an empty room, with whispering voices and spectral mocking laughter assailing the troubled protagonist. The sound design here was carefully fashioned by Daphne Oram, one of the founders of the Radiophonic Workshop. Here on the radio, Toop is content to make use of a more familiar example, Hitchcock’s Psycho, in order that the shrieking strings of Bernard Herrmann’s score can be played. These alarming stabs are perhaps the best known and certainly amongst the most effective musical expressions of sudden terror. Toop keeps out of the shower, however, and instead refers to the scene in which Martin Balsam’s detective slowly climbs the stairs in the old house before being attacked by Norman’s ‘mother’. Marcus Leadley, a sound researcher, identifies high and low end sounds as being the most effective in inducing fear, with deep rumbling undertones building a sense of undefined, amorphous dread and an anticipation of impending terror, whose eventual emergence may be signified by the sudden leap into the upper register – the harsh, treble pitch of the scream. Both ends of the spectrum affect the body physically, sounds passing through flesh and bone to be felt viscerally.

There are some fascinating insights into the physical origins of human fear impulses revealed by the neuroscientist Sophie Scott. It is the old attic rooms of the brain which deal with fear; the amygdala, part of the ancient lizard core. This is also the centre from which anger and rage radiate. Most fear triggers and responses appear to be innate, a basic set of emotions which are universal across cultures and even across species. The sounds which convey disgust, terror or sudden shock remain essentially the same across the animal kingdom. As Mark Cousins observed in his Story of Film series (when talking about the advent of the horror movie), no emotion affects us more directly or primally than fear. Toop talks of sound being apprehended on an instantaneous and instinctive level before rational understanding has the time to process the information (or before the imagination toys with it). He cites a personal example of having heard a ‘cartoon monkey chant’ like that of the Balinese Kecak chorus in the middle of the night. It was only upon further bleary investigation that he divined its true origins to lie in a fight between two London foxes. The prosaic dispelled the exotic creations of an aurally stimulated mind, unknown sounds sparking personal associations and dream images.

Louis Niebur, a professor of musicology at the University of Nevada and author of the book Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is on hand to talk about the otherworldly quality which much electronic music used to possess (and continues to in some quarters). He points to this stemming from the sounds having no identifiable grounding in the world of physical materiality. Their origins are thus open to imaginative interpretation, and the imagination tends to approach the unknown with a certain amount of trepidation, if not outright fear. The media history professor David Hendy talks about the early days of radio, with its disembodied voices carried across the airwaves. Its development coincided with the post war period in which there was a widespread need to believe in a continuity of being beyond death, so many bodies having disappeared without trace beneath the mud of the Western European battlefields. Sir Oliver Lodge, a pioneer of early radio invention and discovery, about whom Hendy has written, was also a keen believer in psychic phenomena, and was president of The Society for Psychical Research from 1901-1903, and a member, alongside Arthur Conan Doyle, of the Ghost Club. As well as numerous scientific works with titles like The Ether of Space and Life and Matter, he also wrote about spiritualism. In particular, he detailed the contacts he believed he had made with his son Raymond, killed in the war, through various mediums in the heartbreaking book Raymond, or Life and Death (1916). Perhaps he heard the voices of the dead in the sea of static and the aetheric wind whistling between stations, the aural equivalent of pattern recognition which leads us to see a face on the moon or in the grain of a wooden table surface. David Toop also writes about Electronic Voice Production, which pseudo-scientifically holds out he hope that the voices of the dead can be captured on tape. Californian author Tim Powers literalises this figure of speech in his novel Expiration Date, in which ghosts are captured by an elaboration of Edison’s early recording equipment (Edison’s ghost is itself a character in the story) by the predatory living who consume their essence in an attempt to achieve immortality. Toop talks about the impermanent nature of sound, its short-lived existence in time, as imbuing it with an inherent sense of loss, of disappearance and fading memory, and ultimately of death. This leads to the idea that the ultimate sound of fear is in fact the absence of sound. The well-known anecdote about John Cage’s 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber, a room which eliminates all sound, is retold. As all external sound was removed, Cage expected to experience total silence. Instead he heard a high pitched whine and a low, steady hum. When he asked about these sounds, he was told that he was listening to his nervous system and the circulation of his blood. The true sound of silence is the sound of death. Life is sound, so lend an ear and make a merry clangour.

Sinister Resonance in Electric Eden

Two absolutely essential books are appearing on the publishing horizon, both set to come out later this summer. They both look at music within wider cultural (and social and philosophical) contexts and both are by writers associated with the magazine The Wire. Both could be said to be connecting with current trends on the musical margins (the folk revival – or rather a revival of the 60s/70s folk revival – and the ‘hauntological’ summoning of the ghosts of the mediated past) but placing them at the crest of the broad sweep of history lends them a depth which gives us an idea of why they have made such an impact on a certain (admittedly small) section of the population.

The first book is David Toop’s Sinister Resonance, subtitled The Mediumship of the Listener. It comes with an impressive pre-publication collection of recommendations from a varied roster of artists, from musicians and composers such as David Sylvian, Alvin Curran and Christoph Cox, to writer Steve Erickson and film makers and puppeteers the Brothers Quay. This is testament to the breadth of cultural reference which Toop brings to his books. Part of their pleasure is in the unexpected juxtapositions which they introduce between seemingly disparate musicians (and, indeed, artforms). His first book (excepting Rap Attack, which as the title suggests, was more narrowly focussed), Ocean of Sound, ranged from Debussy to Indian dhrupad singing, free jazz noise attack to Eno-esque ambient calm. Exotica traced the invisible threads connecting the likes of Sun Ra with Martin Denny (well, maybe not so invisible there) and Haunted Weather set the radar to detect the music emerging from the cracks between sound and silence in the new millennium, taking in the wildlife sound recordings of Chris Watson and the digital minimalism of Toshimaru Nakamura and Ryoji Ikeda, with a fascinating detour to look at the soundscapes which Toru Takemitsu produced for the 60s films of Hiroshi Teshigahara (Japan always tends to be Toop’s centre of gravity when it comes to cultural reference).

Toop points out in his introduction (part of which you can read on the Continuum site, here) that this book is ‘more about listening than it is about music’. He begins by relating an experience of waking in the night to hear the dying echoes of a sound, whose source remained mysterious and which may indeed have leaked through the boundaries of dream. This is the Sinister Resonance of the title, which he goes on to explain thus: ‘sound is a sinister resonance, an association with irrationality and inexplicability, that which we both desire and dread’. Such an association leads on to hauntings and his fascination with supernatural fiction which he shares with many of the ‘hauntological’ artists. He gives his own interpretation of that horribly clunky academic neologism (invented, perhaps inevitably, by a French philosopher – Jacques Derrida) in terms of ‘exploring the ghostly and nostalgic affect of music’. ‘Sinister Resonance’, he states, ‘begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory’. The thinking behind the subtitle‘The Mediumship of the Listener’ is elucidated by noting that ‘listening, as if to the dead, like a medium who deals only in history and what is lost, the ear attunes itself to distant signals, eavesdropping on ghosts and their chatter’. He talks of late night reading, which makes him more alert to the sound in silence, and also ‘to the importance of sound in literature, not only for the twentieth century authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett, but in the supernatural fiction and ghost stories of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, Arthur Machen, Bram Stoker and Wilkie Collins’. Two examples of the emotional impact of sound exaggerated by surrounding silence within supernatural fictions (in this case films) are given, the first arising from an interview with a member of The Animal Collective, who recalls the effect of the music and sound design of The Shining. Toop talks of the crunch of snow, the bounce of the ball, Danny’s car in the corridor driving over different surfaces (with their hard and soft sounds) and the distant echo of dance band music, whose obscured source is located in time as much as space (hauntological before its time). The second is the sound of the harp played without the touch of human hand in The Haunting, an effect which director Robert Wise may have borrowed from a similar scene in I Walked With a Zombie, produced by his mentor Val Lewton. Toop also points to the seemingly counterintuitive dimension of ‘listening’ within visual media, citing Nicolas Maes’ painting The Eavesdropper, and also mentioning Juan Munoz, Georges Seurat, Marcel Duchamp and Ad Reinhardt. He intriguingly posits that sound provides ‘a hidden if uncertain history within otherwise silent media’, perceptible through a species of clairaudience. It’ll be fascinating to hear what any accompanying CD might contain. A series of readings intermixed with resonant sound from film, maybe.

The second book is Rob Young’s Electric Eden, subtitled Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. This traces the changing ways in which British (although it looks like they’re predominantly English) traditions have found expression throughout the twentieth century and on into this one. It’s not shy of using the f-word (folk) to describe many of the impulses underlying the music which it looks at, but at the same time isn’t bound by it. This is a musical stream from which a wide variety of artists have drawn, effecting their own transformations whilst maintaining a sense of underlying continuity. The eclecticism of the Matter of Britain which Young draws together can be gleaned from the links which he provides at the book’s accompanying blog (which you can find here). These include Vaughan Williams, Sandy Denny, Ghost Box, Kate Bush and early music pioneer David Munrow amongst the musicians; William Blake, John Clare, Arthur Machen, William Morris, John Cowper Powys and Christopher Priest amongst the writers (the latter presumably for his A Dream of Wessex); and on the ‘magic box’, The Changes (when will the BBC get round to releasing this?), Smallfilms (Oliver Postgate), Derek Jarman, Powell and Pressburger and Peter Watkins. All indubitably British and the kind of names far more likely to conjure my nationalistic pride than the usual martial icons of Churchill and Nelson etc. Other links take you to the excellent Toys and Techniques blog; the fantastic graphic work of David Owen at the Ink Corporation, which re-imagines folk as a popular art form central to British culture; Subterraenea Britannica, which explores the man made underground spaces of the land; and the unclassifiable English Heretic.

The cover of the book is particularly fine, with its ploughman working his way around the pylon standing in the centre of the field. Big technology in a rural setting always tends to make me think of some post-catastrophe world in which pylons and cooling towers stand as memorials to a fallen civilisation in much the same way as Roman bridges and temples must have done in the early centuries of the last millennium. The pylon plays an important symbolic role in The Changes, which takes part in an England in which technology, and electricity in particular, is suddenly considered evil. Young also points to the post industrial fantasies of late Victorian and Edwardian society in his excellent Guardian article on Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia (find it here), mentioning William Morris’ News From Nowhere, Richard Jeffries’ After London and HG Wells’ The Time Machine (in which the bucolic future world of idle pleasures is, of course, a false Eden). The publishing blurb for the book offers an enticing glimpse of what we can expect:

‘In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations – song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. In a sweeping panorama of Albion’s soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism. A wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity, Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain’s folk music and Arcadian dreams.’

Dreams and hauntings, the daytime reveries of English pastoral Edens, and the nervous nighttime glances over the shoulder at small sounds real or imagined. The books look set to provide an ideal complementary pairing. I look forward to reading them both.