Quiet Time

This piece is part of our series with Naive Yearly, a conference on the odd, quiet, and poetic web. Read Kristoffer Tjalve’s foreword to the series here.

Prior to the discovery of echolocation, facial vision was the term given to the phenomenon by which non-sighted humans are able to navigate by sound. The fact of its curious naming is rooted in the extraordinary way in which this sense registered to those who reported it: a sense of pressure on the body, especially around the face. In John Hull’s Touching the Rock, he describes this experience after he had lost his sight: “Where one should perceive the movement of air and a certain openness, somehow one becomes aware of a stillness, an intensity instead of an emptiness, a sense of vague solidity. The exact source of the sensation is difficult to locate. It seems to be the head, yet often it seems to extend to the shoulders and even the arms.”¹

In 1944, facial vision gave way to echolocation, which first appeared in print in an article titled Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats and Radar for Science.² Its coinage came from the scientist Donald R. Griffin, who used this new term to associate his groundbreaking research on bat navigation with the emergent radar technologies of his time. Like so much asphalt poured on the road to modernity, this shift in language accompanied a larger transition in how we make sense of our senses, away from its embodied and integrated forms towards the abstract and objectively measurable.

This reorientation of listening can also be seen in the way in which background music was instrumentalized during the advent of Taylorism applied to the management of industrial factories.³ By 1945, a company called Muzak, Inc. had contracts to transmit background music over telephone wires into as many as 6,000 American factories.⁴ These pre-recorded broadcasts consisted of ebbs and flows of instrumental music, which softened the brutality of long hours on the factory floor and aligned workers towards greater productivity.

For both facial vision and background music, the environment impresses itself upon the individual subconsciously, trespassing against the conscious mind in plain sight. But while facial vision describes a form of sense-making in which the acoustic environment is constructed into an embodied perception of space, Muzak instead induced sense-masking, a desensitization to the built environment in the service of labor discipline. Through the mass deindustrialization in the West over the intervening decades, changing forms of background music trace an ongoing evolution of how we put music to work.

In the liner notes to his album Music for Airports, the composer Brian Eno published something of a manifesto for what he called Ambient music. As a rebuttal to Muzak’s utilitarian program, and to reclaim the humanist potential of what background music could be, he wrote that “while Muzak worked by layering on sound to strip the acoustic environment of its idiosyncrasies in order to facilitate repetitive labor, Ambient music instead intended to enhance the perception of environment while inducing a sense of calm.”⁵

The mythologized moment in Eno’s turn to background music came in 1975, while he was recovering from a punctured lung. Although uncredited in Eno’s origin stories about Ambient music, his friend Judy Nylon had paid him a visit in his hospital room with a long-playing record of harp music. She has since relayed her own account of this event: “I put the harp music on and balanced it as best as I could from where I stood; he caught on immediately to what I was doing and helped me balance the softness of the rain patter with the faint string sound for where he lay in the room. There was no ‘ambience by mistake.’”⁶

This intentional act of balancing composed sounds against the ambient environment is also exercised by the composer Jakob Ullmann. In the text accompanying his recorded music, Ullmann gives the listener the following direction: “Please choose, for each piece, the volume settings of your sound system so as to just barely mask the ambient sounds in the room.”⁷ 

Ullmann works exclusively within this liminal space of quiet, where the dividing line between background and foreground is calibrated finely into a blur. His works, which are recorded in acoustically resonant spaces with classical instrumentation, are delicate and languorous, like watching the soft, shifting shadows of leaves under the fading sun, or seeping blooms under a watercolor brush (as he sometimes uses in his graphic scores). Although his compositional strategies bear a resemblance to the origin story of Eno’s Ambient music, his work is rooted in his own formative experiences as a boy in post-war Germany. He describes an instance when the East German government deployed loudspeakers on lorries to his small village, bombarding its residents with propaganda to coerce them into joining the Agricultural Production Cooperative. This oppressive sound, persisting through the night, lingered with him long afterwards and led him towards the path of becoming a composer himself, in order to “get out this cruel noise.”⁸

However, as the sound artist Hildegard Westerkamp writes, “an authoritarian environment does not have to be loud for us to lower our voices or not to talk at all.”⁹ Westerkamp shares an affinity with Ullmann for the liminal space of quiet, and in recordings like Kits Beach Soundwalk,¹⁰ the noise floor of the media object itself sets the stage for a psychoacoustic encounter with a real and imagined landscape. Like a land artist working with pure air, her studio practice critiques what the music scholars Simon and Schumacher have identified, that “Muzak would seem to epitomize the more diffuse, anonymous practices of power characteristic of post-Fordist economic, cultural, and institutional relations.”¹¹ The normalization of background music listening today may then be emblematic of the ways in which we cope and silence ourselves through the disquiet of affective media. Enter Spotify, which the writer Liz Pelly has compellingly argued is Muzak for the 21st century, as culture has transitioned from the era of centralized broadcast media to contemporary modes of cybernetic production, transmission, and consumption.

“Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack,”¹² Pelly reports. Like Muzak before it, Spotify identified a mode of listening that could be operationalized, allowing users to access background music that was suited to a given task or situation. Considering that the majority of circumstances that users rely on Spotify for are oriented towards productivity and wellness, it’s almost surprising that companies don’t pay for their employees’ Spotify subscriptions, like the contracts paid by factory owners in the 1940s.

Given the prevalence of background music today, it’s ironic that Eno’s Ambient music has been systematically removed from mood-oriented playlists on Spotify and replaced increasingly with ghost artists with cheaper licensing deals.¹³ This type of revenue-optimization strategy has emerged through cycles of product development in which Spotify transitioned from a music distribution service to a product in its own right, with its circumscribed user behaviors. In this development towards music as a service, Pelly notes that “In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening?”¹⁴

In the age of platform capitalism, streaming services like Spotify pursue endless data-driven optimizations that are measured against metrics of engagement. The results are not desire paths, but instead resemble the horizontal escalators one finds at airports. But as we find ourselves in a state of perpetual transit across platforms like so many virtual airports, we might wonder what exactly it means to be half-listening to a Spotify stream; what is the half of us that is doing the listening, and to what end?

The neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist, in his landmark book on brain hemispheres, The Master and His Emissary, gives a comprehensive overview of the ways in which the two hemispheres of the brain operate in surprisingly divergent ways. To give an example, he writes, “If you are a bird, you solve the conundrum of how to eat and stay alive by employing different strategies with either eye: the right eye (left hemisphere) for getting and feeding, the left eye (right hemisphere) for vigilant awareness of the environment.”¹⁵ While vision as a whole is composed from both eyes, he notes that each of the eyes is preferentially oriented towards either the focused attention of completing a task (like getting food) or a broader form of attention turned towards the wider environment.

Although the simple example McGilchrist gives is for birds, this distinction is broadly generalizable to all animal species, and may provide a speculative framework to question cultural assumptions in privileging the foreground over background. McGilchrist’s selection of the word feeding in association with the activity of the left hemisphere of the brain serves as an apt metaphor for the ways in which our focused attention enacts an ancient theater of appetite. Our screens emerge from a longer history of the techno-social production of surfaces, and with it a culture of consumption.

If indeed our brains sustain two simultaneous yet disparate forms of attention, out of long-established evolutionary pressures around eating without getting eaten, the organization of contemporary life around our screens may itself be a program of austerity on our capacity for environmental attention. In a world increasingly composed of surfaces and feeds, the elusively subconscious right hemisphere of the brain may well be staging a sort of return of the repressed. Our behaviors of half-listening and in reaching for the second screen¹⁶ may in part be a compulsion to restore some balance between the foreground and background, corresponding to our two modes of attention.

As we clamor for cultural consensus around the impoverishment of focused attention, perhaps this is an appropriate moment to simultaneously direct our attention more broadly towards the liminal and the environmental. Unfurling quietly at the edge of our senses, the music of composers like Jakob Ullmann and Hildegard Westerkamp still holds a radical humanist promise. In a quote attributed to Spotify founder Daniel Ek when speaking at a company all-hands, he says “Our only competitor is silence.”¹⁷ To which I say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

**

My earliest memory of sound is from grade school in Southern California. After lunchtime recess, we would head back into the classroom for quiet time, during which we would simply sit restfully at our desks. I would often lay my head on my arms folded over the desk, but on one hot day, I laid my head directly on the wood-veneered tabletop to feel the coolness of its surface directly against my cheek. Sitting in that silence, my head quietly flooded with sound.

Seductively sonorous, the subterranean roar of these sounds, I would much later come to speculate, emanated from the school’s HVAC systems, the passing of cars, and perhaps even the earth’s mantle. Whatever their origins, these vibrations had emanated through the concrete foundation of the school before traveling up the metal legs of my desk and on through the wooden tabletop, before transducing into the hardened calcium deposits of my adolescent skull and reaching into my auditory organs. 

From within the soft folds of this silence, I found myself conscious of the miraculous fact of my own listening. As an addendum to the composer John Cage’s notes on the fiction of silence,¹⁸ the artist Micah Silver further suggests “perhaps a more radical position than imagining that there is no silence is to say there is no listening with only ears.”¹⁹

On the occasion of Naive Yearly 2024, Kristoffer poetically suggested that I present a screenless talk, which would take place outdoors on the grounds of the Fužine Castle at Ljubljana’s Museum of Architecture and Design. At the conclusion of my talk on the subject of background music, I presented what I sometimes call a “group listening performance.” In this piece, entitled River Song, audience members were directed to a webpage that randomly assigned each of their phones a single note to play from a larger harmonic chord structure. These notes slowly diminished in volume until reaching silence while audience members roamed along the Ljubljanica River. I intended this improvised choreography of shifting sound and bodies to produce a kind of sonic sculpture that slowly brought the environment into awareness, to “frame noise, present it, articulate the way its sounding reveals also an intimate structure, a micro-surface of folds, and the continuation of these folds into our bodies [20],” as the writer Lisa Robertson puts it.

This presentation was a sequel to Frog Chorus,²¹ an homage to the physicist and sound artist Felix Hess, which I presented earlier that year with Laurel Schwulst’s Fruitful School. Both of these pieces have a resonance with what Mack Hagood describes as ritual technology: “digital media that help us reflect upon and open up our own media enclosures.”²² In an age where all media can be rendered “ambient” by being pushed to the background, we might instead imagine a poetic web that mediates experiences of both focused and environmental attention, to interlace figure and ground into a chimerical and secret third thing; an invitation to consider what silence feels like when the screen melts into air.