Sonic Substances and Silent Sounds: an Auditory Anthropology of Ritual Songs

In Western Amazonian indigenous and mestizo medical concepts, substances play a great role. In order for a substance to be efficient, a ritual or medical specialist should sing a song or whistle a melody towards the remedy. The song is then ‘contained’ in the remedy. The song may be for instructing, negotiating with, or repulsing non-human persons, like animals, spirits, or ancestors. Magical singing is also effective by singing directly to a client. Specialists can establish performative ontological linkages between human and non-human persons. By singing such linkages into being, the singer inscribes the non-human’s qualities in the human client’s body, very much like when ingesting a substance. The singers’ voices are understood as a substance that remains in the body. The same applies if the song was sung or whistled onto a remedy or a tobacco cigarette. These phenomena allow for a deeper investigation into indigenous conceptualisations of the sonic and of what can be heard and understood by whom. Finally, these findings shed more light on local concepts of the structure of the world within which we, and the spirits, live. An Assumed Certainty Creates Many Questions This Special Issue is dedicated to “the alchemical person” that is, to the crucial roles that a variety of substances obtain in their applications in the making and the maintenance of human persons. A collection of excellent contributions highlights many different aspects of substance production and uses, sometimes even abuse. In order to extend, rather than further deepen the issue’s scope, my descriptions of vegetal, animal, or inorganic remedies, which I have yet to mention, may appear somewhat superficial. This is the case because my focus is not on physical matter; rather, I will try to grasp and explain the applicability of a substance usually (although rather arbitrarily) understood as intangible: sound. The standard Western definition of sound is generally described as a form of energy that travels in waves through a medium. This appears rather commonplace, but let me try to make clear what this means. In acoustics, sound is defined as energy emitted by vibrations or turbulence transmitted through a medium, where it dissipates with time, unless constantly repeated. For example, imagine a person plucking a string on a guitar once: the player transmits energy to the string, which in consequence moves back and forth until the energy is neutralised by inertia and air resistance. Meanwhile, every impulse of the cord moving back and forth, say, its vibrations, are transmitted mainly via the wooden (or in some cases metallic) bridge to the guitar’s body. The hollow body of a guitar is designed in a way so that the air contained within resonates with major formants of the string’s complex movements.1 Thus, the wooden cover of the guitar’s body acts as a membrane2 (allowing movement back and forth) that transmits the vibrations, amplified by resonance, to the surrounding air. Although intuition tells us that the air does not move in the same way as wind does when transmitting sounds, it actually does, on a smaller scale. The membrane (guitar body cover) hits some air molecules, which are thrown away from it by this impulse. They move that way until they collide with other air molecules that take over the impulse and continue this movement. Meanwhile, the membrane has moved backwards, thus creating a downfall of air pressure, “sucking” 25 Brabec de Mori: Sonic Substances and Silent Sounds Published by Digital Commons @ Trinity, 2015 back the first wave of molecules, which will again be hit hard by the membrane as soon as it moves forth again. Thus, wave after wave of air molecules move back and forth, until the initial vibrations die away (this can happen rather quickly; e. g. an ideal “click” only issues forth one wave of molecules). With this example it is shown that sound moves not only through air (in transversal waves) but also, usually considerably faster, through solid bodies like the guitar’s bridge and body (in longitudinal waves). On the other end of this energy transmission, a receiver may be located. The receiver may be a measuring unit like a microphone, but also a human being with, we assume, a “normally working auditory apparatus”, and, to be sure, who is in a “normal waking state”. The outer ear of our ideal listener captures, directs, and focuses these waves of colliding air particles on the tympanum—another membrane (note that also most sound detecting machines, like microphones, make use of membranes) that is put into vibration. Now, a highly complicated succession of energy transmission and transformation is triggered, which I will describe here briefly.3 The tympanum is directly connected to the first of three middle ear bones, which are linked to each other. Here, the waves are transformed into solid body vibrations (through the bones) before being transmitted to the next membrane: the third ear bone is attached to the “oval window”. On this membrane’s far side, inside the cochlea, a lymphatic liquid awaits to take over the impulses from the membrane, so the guitar cord’s energy finally causes this liquid to flow in and out of the cochlea, thereby causing the cochlear basilar membrane to move. This movement “pumps” liquid into and out of a tiny chamber on the Corti organ. In the channel to this chamber, hair cells are stimulated: when the hair is put into motion, the cell’s far end causes neural transmitter substances to be released into a synaptic gap. Now, a chemical reaction ensues in an incredibly short span of time where a neuron fires an electrical impulse through the auditory nerve towards the limbic system in the central nervous system, where another complex and still not entirely explored succession of electrochemical transformations and transmissions in the auditory cortex occur, before the listener “consciously perceives a sound”.4