Reverberation as Mimetic Replication: Urban Space, Metro Buskers and Acoustic Experience

Wees, Nick

doi:0137-4079

Reverberation as Mimetic Replication: Urban Space, Metro Buskers and Acoustic Experience Wees, Nick

Object structure

Reverberation as Mimetic Replication: Urban Space, Metro Buskers and Acoustic Experience

Ethnologia Polona 39 2018 (2019)

Wees, Nick

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences

reverberation ; resonance ; mimesis ; acoustic perception ; busker ; metro musician ; architectural acoustics ; urban space

This article examines the essential role of reverberation in everyday spatial experience and argues that the perception and production of reverberation – along with the related concepts of resonance and echo – is an example of an innate mimetic capacity residing in both living beings and seemingly inert matter. Reverberation, and acoustic experience more generally, are explored in relation to urban space, with attention paid to the transformation of sense experience in modernity. Drawing on a range of authors, with reference to the work of Walter Benjamin in particular, this article proceeds from a primarily theoretical level to that of concrete human experience, with the example of buskers (street musicians) who perform in the highly reverberant spaces of Montreal’s underground metro system. Drawing on the author’s ethnographic research among metro musicians, this article demonstrates that reverberation is a vital element in busker practices and experience, and argues that, in their practices and in their effects on space and passersby, metro buskers make evident – make perceptible – the mimetically reverberant relations between body and space, and between self and other.

Augé M. 1986. Un Ethnologue dans le métro. Paris: Hachette.
Augoyard J.-F. and Torgue H. 2005. Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Benjamin W. 2007. On the mimetic faculty. In P. Demetz, (ed.), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books, 333–336.
Benjamin W. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin W. and Tarnowski K. 1979. Doctrine of the similar (1933). New German Critique 17, 65–69.
Blesser B. and Salter, L.-R. 2007. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Boetzkes A. 2010. The Ephemeral stage at Lionel Groulx station. In A. Boutros and W. Straw (eds.), Circulation and the City. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 138–154.
Boudreault-Fournier A. 2017. Recording and editing. In D. Elliot and D. Culhane (eds.) A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. North York: University of Toronto Press, 69–89.
Chion M. 2012. The Three listening modes. In J. Sterne (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 48–53.
Frazer J. G. 1990. The Golden Bough, Part 1 Volume 1. London: MacMillan.
Feld S. and Brenneis D. 2004. Doing anthropology in sound. American Ethnologist 31(4), 461–474.
Green A.-M. 1998. Musicien de métro: Approche des musiques vivantes. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Hall M. 2010. Dialectical sonority: Walter Benjamin’s acoustics of profane illumination. Telos 152, 38–102.
Helmreich S. 2012. “An Anthropologist underwater: immersive soundscapes, submarine cyborgs and transductive ethnography. In J. Sterne (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 168–185.
Howes D. 2005. Hyperesthesia, or, the sensual logic of late capitalism.” In D. Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses. Oxford: Berg, 281–303.
Howes D. and Classen C. 2014. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. New York: Routledge.
Imai H. 2008. Senses on the move: multisensory encounters with street vendors in the Japanese urban alleyway roji. Senses & Society 3(3), 329–338.
Ingold T. 2007. Against soundscape. In A. Carlyle (ed.), Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Paris: Double Entendre, 10–13.
Ingold T. 2011. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
Jackson M. 2017. How Life Worlds Work: Emotionality, Sociality, and the Ambiguity of Being. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Labelle B. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum.
Laplantine F. 2015. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury.
Leach N. 2010. “Mimesis.” In G. Hartoonian (ed.), Walter Benjamin and Architecture. London: Routledge, 123–135.
Le Breton D. 2017. Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses. London: Bloomsbury.
Lefebvre H. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum.
Lefebvre H. 1991. The Production of Space. Maiden: Blackwell.
Mauss M. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: Norton.
Mac Arthur J. 2007. Movement and tactility: Benjamin and Wölfflin on imitation in architecture. The Journal of Architecture, 12(5): 477–487.
Merleau -Ponty M. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
O’Callaghan C. 2007. Sounds: A Philosophical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pink S. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage Publications.
Rancière J. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury.
Rice T. 2003. Time, place, and metaphor in musical experience and ethnography. Ethnomusicology 47(2): 151–179.
Rodaway P. 1994. Sensous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. London: Routledge.
Smith M. 2015. Echo. In D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny (eds.), Key Words in Sound. Durham, Duke University Press, 55–64.
Stoller P. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Tanenbaum S. 1995. Underground Harmonies: Music and Politics in the Subways of New York. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Taussig M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge.
Thompson E. 2012. Sound, modernity and history. In J. Sterne (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 116–129.
Truax B. 2001. Acoustic Communication. Westport: Ablex Publishing.
Wees N. 2017. Improvised performances: urban ethnography and the creative tactics of Montreal’s metro buskers. Humanities 6 (3), n.p.
Young N. 2017. Hearing spaces. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (2), 242–255.