“The content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”
— Marshall McLuhan

In 2001, while doing a residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canadian sound artist Janet Cardiff recorded “Forest Walk,” an audio walk that takes listeners on a twelve-minute surreal tour of a wooded area in the small, Canadian Rocky Mountain town. Since then, she and George Bures Miller have published over twenty-five audio and audio/video walks for museums in Canada, the US, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Brazil and the UK. Here’s Cardiff conceptualizing the walks and describing how they’re made:

The format of the audio walks is similar to that of an audioguide. You are given a CD player or Ipod and told to stand or sit in a particular spot and press play. On the CD you hear my voice giving directions, like “turn left here” or “go through this gateway,” layered on a background of sounds: the sound of my footsteps, traffic, birds, and miscellaneous sound effects that have been pre-recorded on the same site as they are being heard. This is the important part of the recording. The virtual recorded soundscape has to mimic the real physical one in order to create a new world as a seamless combination of the two. My voice gives directions but also relates thoughts and narrative elements, which instills in the listener a desire to continue and finish the walk.

All of my walks are recorded in binaural audio with multi-layers of sound effects, music, and voices (sometimes as many as 18 tracks) added to the main walking track to create a 3D sphere of sound. Binaural audio is a technique that uses miniature microphones placed in the ears of a person. The result is an incredibly lifelike 3D reproduction of sound. Played back on a headset, it is almost as if the recorded events were taking place live.

Unfortunately, Cardiff and Bures Miller don’t make their audio walks available on their website. They do, however, provide a list of their collected works, bibliographic information for each walk, and, in some instances, short audio excerpts, such as this one from a 2000 walk titled “Taking Pictures” (headphones required for full 3D effect).

from www.cardiffmiller.com

While Cardiff and Bures Miller’s walks do indeed create fantastical and disorienting combinations of soundscapes, I want to interrogate Cardiff’s use of the term “seamless.” There is no doubt that the walks are inimitably edited and produced, and to the naked ear they do indeed create a seamless combination of soundscapes. But this seamlessness is an illusion, and it is within these seams that Cardiff and Bures Miller reveal and disrupt the listener’s complacency in sound. What I mean by complacency is the passive acceptance of the sonic environments through which we move, and by disrupt I mean that they challenge the privileging of the visual in modes of cultural production. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s walks critique this privileging by de-naturalizing soundscapes and by blending fictional and historical narratives with listener expectations to reveal sound as a social construction. Listeners become hyper-aware of sounds that might otherwise be heard but not paid attention to. For example, in “Forest Walk,” birds chirping or trees rustling in the wind are natural sounds, part of the sequence of our everyday lives, which we seldom stand aside from. When recorded, they become mechanical, uniform and repetitive. Through amplification and acceleration, and when paired with such unnatural sounds as a piano playing in the distance or the voice of a human narrator, the fragmentary characteristic of a soundscape is made linear, fixed in space and time, and encourages listeners to consider what McLuhan calls a “subliminal and docile acceptance” of the sonic environment (20). Even while they remain passive recipients of aural information, so far as being instructed where to walk, when to walk there, and how to interpret what they’re seeing, listeners are persuaded to actively engage with and move through the conditions and contexts that make sound possible. In other words, they are invited to experience sound as event, as an orchestration of the fabricated nature of the ever-changing twenty-first century soundscape, of the way sound informs experience and guides action.

“The walks are really about play,” says Cardiff, “like the kids’ game, a letting-someone-guide-you, covering your eyes, wondering what they’ll do with you” (2000). “Taking Pictures” was made for the St. Louis Art Museum and commissioned by Wonderland, “a group exhibition that included ten artists whose art transforms space – whether architectural, formal, social, or psychological” (Steiner). Drawing from McLuhan, I suggest that the social and psychological transformation enacted through Cardiff and Bures Miller’s audio walks is not accomplished through their listeners (although they are the vehicles through which the transformation is realized), but through the sounds themselves, which generate new ways of listening by revealing sound as “a man-made construction, a colored canvas [that, like Cubist painting,] . . . substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the ‘point-of-view’ or facet of perspective illusion” (12). It does so “by involvement” (13) – that is, by drawing listeners out of a soundscape and depositing them into a reworked, narrativized, and re-presented version, where all sounds are artificial.

Cardiff and Bures Miller’s canvas is made of sound – but what is this sound about? In comparing their walks to cubist painting, where are the “dimensions on canvas, [the] patterns, lights, textures, that [drive] home the message by involvement”? (McLuhan 13). What does it mean when sequence yields to simultaneity, when we enter a “world of structure and of configuration?” (13). What are the phonotexts of our lives, and what does it mean to break into them, to show their edges and mark their place in space and time? “Perhaps it is necessary,” writes Jean-Luc Nancy, “that sense not be content to make sense (or to be logos), but that it want also to resound” (6). Cardiff and Bures Miller’s audio walks, by blocking out and recontextualizing aural experience, “by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in [three] dimensions, drop the illusion of perspective in favour of instant sensory awareness of the whole” (McLuhan 13). Or do they? The walks evoke “a desire to continue and finish,” yes, but they are by no means an entirely autonomous listening activity. They are standardized, choreographed, and rehearsed – interactive only insofar as they disorient and therefore remind the listener of sound’s materiality. While listeners maintain agency by deciding to participate in the first place, and while they extend that agency by choosing to leave their headphones in and follow the narrator’s directions (like good listeners), this agency is predetermined – participants have little control over what they hear, where they walk, or how long they listen. Of course, listeners, for the most part, can control how they are affected – they are free to respond in whatever way they choose – but even this autonomy is contained. Like a rat in a maze, listeners can act out agency but in a controlled environment.

Returning to Cardiff’s statement – “the walks are really about play” – I am reminded of Jonathan Sterne’s “mp3 as Cultural Artifact,” in which he suggests that the mp3 is “shaped by . . . actual and idealized practices of listening” (826). Cardiff and Bures Miller’s audio walks are similarly shaped. They are exercises in listening that occupy the space between actual (natural) and ideal (aesthetically pleasing/artistically charged): the sounds that are inherent in a particular environment, such as those heard in a forest, are overlaid with narration and other extradiegetic sounds (a piano, children’s laughter), creating a real-time fiction that depends on and mystifies a listener’s assumptions about the relationship between sight and sound. Like the mp3, which “plays its listener[,] [the audio walk] is an attempt to mimic and, to some degree preempt, the embodied and unconscious dimension of human perception in the noisy, mixed-media environments of everyday life” (Sterne 835). Cardiff and Bures Miller’s audio walks use the mp3 as a vehicle – an extension of the human ear – for de-familiarizing the relationship between sight and sound: by layering sounds that are inherent to a particular environment with sounds that are alien to it, and by delivering those sounds in mp3 format, listeners are made aware of the discourses that inform their sonic environments, as well as of the artificiality of the mediums that transmit cultural information (i.e. digital media), a result that is achieved by interrupting our immersion in sound – by illustrating what it’s like to live entirely in sound. As R. Murray Schafer reminds us, “there are no earlids” (102).

Sterne states that the mp3 is a “container technology,” imbued with “a whole philosophy of audition and a praxeology of listening” (Sterne 827-28). The audio walk, like the mp3, compresses information (historical, social, cultural), trims the fat, and hands over a narrative, in a “tactile form of embodiment [that] is the requirement and result of digital audio” (827). Instead of being a meaning-making process, listening is reduced to a motor function: our ears are plugged and we are given a story in place of an explanation – sound determines experience, and meaning is disguised by content. The listener is given the illusion that he or she is an active participant in meaning-making, but this is a metaphor: the listener is a product of digital media and the codified discourses that mediate our understanding of the world through which we move.

By way of departure, and to complicate my assessment up to this point, please watch this six-minute excerpt from a 2012 remake of “Forest Walk,” renamed “FOREST (for a thousand years),” created for Documenta 13, a contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. No, the people in the video are not a part of the installation. Nor are they wax sculptures. They’re the participants. On Thursday, I’ll discuss Cardiff and Bures Miller’s use of video, McLuhan’s idea of “hot” and “cold” media, and sound as event.

(Again, headphones are recommended).

Works Cited

Cardiff, Janet. “Taking Pictures.” 2000. Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. mp3.

Cardiff, Janet and George Bures Miller. “FOREST (for a thousand years).” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 28 June 2012. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994. Print.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Print.

Schafer, R. Murray. “The Soundscape.” The Sound Studies Reader. Ed. Jonathan Sterne. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Steiner, Rochelle. “Taking Pictures.” Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller. n.p. n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

Sterne, Jonathan. “MP3 as Cultural Artifact.” New Media & Society 8.5 (2008): 825-42. Web.

“Walks.” Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller. n.p. n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.