PART 2 - CANADA: LOSS OF SOUND. RESEARCH.

 This segment portrays how Rhythm was dulled down and faded away due to the overwhelming move from South Africa to Canada. Not to say that my love for music disappeared, but my unique ability got lost in the foreign experiences of the big move. The academic resources below deepen my understanding of how sound connects to memory, emotion and environment. These are key elements in shaping the mood and meaning of the Canada segment.

MUSIC AND EMOTION

Isabelle Peretz - Chapter 5: Towards a Neurobiology of Musical Emotions

This segment reflects the emotional stillness I felt after moving to Canada. Inspired by Juslin’s idea that “emotions like sadness and fear are easily expressed through music, much like facial expressions, I used slow melodies, ambient textures and minimal harmony to convey isolation and quiet reflection.” In Vancouver, I heard a street singer whose lyrics I couldn’t make out, yet the emotion in his voice struck me. As Peretz notes, “Emotional processing can take different routes... one determined by vocal form”. I didn’t understand the words, but I still felt what he meant. A Native throat singing performance in Penticton challenged me. The sound was unfamiliar, even jarring. Still, it managed to move me. Peretz writes, “My dislike was probably a cultural response, whereas my emotional reaction was a biological reflex”. That moment showed me how emotion can bypass taste. 

(Chapter 4 – page 81) – Include readings that are referenced.

When I moved to Canada, I didn’t just leave behind a country; I left behind the sound that made me feel whole. The silence I felt wasn’t just quiet; it was the absence of a familiar emotional language. As Juslin (2001) explains, emotions felt through music aren’t like other emotions. They run deeper, tied into our identity in a way that everyday feelings aren’t. I didn’t realise how much sound shaped my daily life until it disappeared (Juslin, 2001). What I was feeling wasn’t just homesickness; it was a disruption of something aesthetic and personal, the kind of emotional response that connects your sense to memory and meaning (Juslin, 2001).

(Chapter 18) – Emotions in Everyday Listening to Music.

a quiet emotional shift I experienced during my time in Canada. As Sloboda and O’Neill explain, emotional responses to music are “coloured, and sometimes completely determined, by... contextual factors.” My goal was to reflect not abstract sadness, but the specific, culturally shaped feeling of isolation and stillness that came from relocation.

Musical Content interacts with personal context, as discussed in Sloboda and O’Neill’s chapter on everyday music listening (2001). They argue that the emotional impact of music depends not only on the sound itself, but on the environment and state in which it’s heard. My use of sparse textures and ambient sounds is intentionally minimal, allowing the emotional weight to come from the broader context of relocation and cultural disorientation.

SONIC AGENCY – SOUND AND EMERGENT FORMS OF RESISTANCE:

Chapter 2: The Invisible:

LaBelle’s idea of the acousmatic as “a listening in the dark” (LaBelle, 2018, p.33) shaped how I think about sound as something that moves beyond the visible. It helped me explore listening to engage with absence, dislocation, and what isn’t immediately seen or understood.

“Invisibility may enable means for escape and withdrawal, for covert intervention and antagonism, as well as for survival” (LaBelle, 2018, p. 42). This made me reflect on how invisibility can be both imposed and chosen, something that can silence but also protect or empower, especially in spaces where visibility can feel unsafe.

Continuing to read this chapter, Jarpa’s use of redacted CIA documents highlights how erasure itself becomes a form of historical record, “images that are and that represent the negation of history... histories of secrets” (LaBelle, 2018, p. 45). This idea resonated with me as a way of understanding silence and absence not as voids, but as materials rich in memory, tension, and hidden meaning.

The Idea that “we are left with the silence of the disappeared and the ambiguities of partial tellings” (LaBelle, 2018, p.47) helped me reflect on how sound can represent those who are no longer visible. It suggested that absence still speaks through fragments, gestures or voices that resist resolution and that listening can be an act of responsibility.

Chapter 3: The Overheard:

Attali views noise as a political force that disrupts social order, offering a framework to read sonic absence as active resistance. In my segment, loss of sound becomes more than silence; it’s a rupture that mirrors erasure and identity tension.

Simmel’s concept of the stranger as both near and distant helps express the immigrant’s dislocation, which is always present yet never fully resolved, as they never fully belong. This tension informs my sound design with fragments, ambient layers reflecting cultural estrangement.

Heckert’s vision of anarchism highlights listening, care and becoming as central to forming direct, compassionate relationships, especially with those who experience the world differently. These values support a more egalitarian form of cohabitation, rooted in empathy and shared responsibility. (LaBell, 2018, p.74)

McLuhan’s idea that electronic media extends vibrations, signals and images in the network culture. This relentlessness shapes how we relate to others, listen and express ourselves, making our sense of identity deeply entangled with digital flows (LaBelle, 2018, p. 77).

Lastly, Lacey shifts focus from freedom of speech to “freedom of listening,” highlighting it as an active, responsive act. This concept supports the idea that genuine engagement and plurality in public discourse depend not just on speaking, but on how we listen and respond.

       THE AUDIBLE PAST: CULTURAL ORIGINS OF SOUND REPRODUCTION

Jonathan Sterne’s discussion of the tympanic function challenges the idea that sound reproduction technologies naturally evolved into their modern forms. He critiques theories that begin with contemporary assumptions, instead calling for a shift in focus towards “the social, cultural and technical mechanisms that open up the questions of those relations in the first place.” This approach resists technological determinism and instead emphasises how meaning and function are constructed over time. Sterne highlights that while sound technologies like the telephone and phonography may have started by mimicking the ear, they would eventually develop their own trajectories. As he writes, “they certainly would undergo their own transformations as they grew more socially and institutionally established.” What begins as imitation eventually detaches from its source: “the human ear would become but one more instance of a general tympanic function,” which spreads across contexts and institutions. Sterne’s historical account also underscores the symbolic shift from organic to mechanical, as early inventors experiment with actual human ears. Despite this, the real ear proved inadequate. “They all worked, even the real ear telephone, which was, however, the poorest of the lot.” These moments illustrate how deeply sound perception and reproduction are entangled with broader cultural and institutional forces, rather than being governed solely by physical or technical necessity. (Sterne, 2003).

Exploring the second chapter of Sterne’s writings, I was struck by his idea that “listening involves will, both conscious and unconscious, perhaps a better word would be disposition or even feel.” It made me think about how we are shaped to listen in certain ways depending on where we come from, what we’ve experienced, and what we expect to hear. This links directly to the concept of habitus, where “orientations toward and styles of listening are part of the sociologists and anthropologists have come to call the habitus.” Listening isn’t neutral; it’s loaded with social and cultural conditioning. What stood out most to me was how listening becomes a space where deeper structures play out: “audition becomes a site through which modern power relations can be elaborated, managed and acted out.” That line helped me reflect on who gets listened to, whose voices carry weight, and how systems decide what sounds matter. (Sterne, 2003)

ARTICLES:

New ways of hearing: a brief history of ambient music.

In composing “Loss of Sound,” I drew on the historical roots of ambient music as a space for reflection, atmosphere and emotional absence. John Cage’s 4’33” was especially influential, a work that asked audiences to shift their attention to surrounding sounds, reframing silence as sonic experience. This concept resonated with my own experience of dislocation in Canada, where silence became emotionally loaded. Brian Eno’s description of ambient music is as being “as ignorable as it is interesting” also guided my approach, prompting me to create textures that blend into the environment while still inviting deeper emotional listening. The influence of Erik Satie’s “musique d’ameublement” is also present in the piece’s repetition and structural simplicity, allowing sound to exist more as a presence than a performance.

Finally. The minimalist practices of composers like Steve Reich and La Monte Young supported my use of sustained tones and gradual shifts to mirror the quiet, internal process of adaptation and identity reconstruction.

LINK TO LOSS OF SOUND CREATIVE LOG - CLICK HERE

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

BOOKS:

Juslin, P.N. and Sloboda, J.A. (2001). Music and emotion: theory and research. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

 Labelle, B. (2020). SONIC AGENCY: sound and emergent forms of resistance. Goldsmiths Press.

Sterne, J. (2003). The audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press.

ARTICLE:

Mullen, M. (2022). New ways of hearing: a brief history of ambient music. MusicRadar. Available at: https://www.musicradar.com/news/brief-history-of-ambient-music.

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