Nicholas Burman
, May 8th, 2021 08:16
From the stethoscope to contemporary sound art via wartime psychoacoustics, a new book dives into the strange history of binaural sound
The history of sound and music has often been told from the performer s point of view. Gascia Ouzounian’s
Stereophonica instead places listeners and the act of listening front and centre, drawing particular attention to the way in which sound and space have become conceptually wedded.
While reading Ouzounian’s book I often found myself thinking about Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film
The Conversation. In it, Gene Hackman’s character surveils the world by attempting to listen to what people are saying. It is generally understood as a depiction of the paranoia which permeated Western culture, especially in America, throughout the 1970s.
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In the arid mountain terrain of the Sinai Peninsula after living with Bedouin shepherds and their herd for months, Amal Khalaf abruptly turned her back on her dream job at the age of 22.
Khalaf, as an integral member of a small television team recording the annual migration of a Tarabin tribal family, was no longer stuck in an office in London doing research but directly involved in the story as it was constructed in the desert.
The talents of her fellow documentary makers aside, however, she was growing increasingly uneasy. There was a feeling of distance and of extracting too much from people who “had themselves never seen a television set nor a camera”.