Get off your high horse
A child of the Greek civil war, my grandmother came to Australia as an economic refugee in 1954. She began her Australian life in the rural immigration camps on the border of Victoria and New South Wales. Throughout her life, she encountered multitudes of sonic ecologies, such as the changing environment from Greece to Australia. The air, forests, water, plains, birds, and insects which constructed the geography and climate of her life were fragmented. John Berger calls emigration a type of dismantling of the center of the world, a movement “into a lost, disorientation of fragments.” (1) I contend, that in listening closely to my grandmother's voice I will hear these fragments and traces of her ecological stories.
Grandmother’s voice is paradoxically metaphorical and literal; it is immediate and at the same time it is a cultural constitution. My grandmother has a relationship to the environment and sound, and also a direct relationship with me through the character of her voice. Her voice leaves an imprint on me and informs my microcosm of making and composing. This effect is similar to the way the ecological soundscape imprints and impacts the experience of the listener. Through a system of archetypal sounds like bird song, cicada rhythms, and the ocean—the sense of self and soundscape become inextricably linked. (2)
Andrew Whitehouse unpacks this psychological effect of sound and selfhood when speaking of sonic disappearance. He references the account of a farmer’s experience when encountering the absence of bird song after a spraying program was implemented to control fire ants in his town. The local residents experienced a shock that was “unexpected and unnerving.”(3) Their lives were accompanied by these familiar companions and highlights the emotional effect of changing sonic ecologies on the listener. Whitehouse argues that there are “symbolic and moral connotations of listening to birds in the Anthropocene that follow from their iconic and indexical grounding in places.” (4) This produces a series of anxious semiotics, where even positive affiliations can have “uncertain implications.” (5) I feel these implications when listening to my grandmother’s voice as I witness her eventual disappearance.
1 John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 57.
2 Lawrence Kramer, The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 91.
3 Andrew Whitehouse, “Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene, The Anxious Semiotics of Sound in a Human-Dominated World,” Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, (2015), 55. http://www.environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.3.pdf.
4 Whitehouse, “Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene,” 56.
5 ibid