Smart Grrl Summer: Religion & Sound with Dr. Vicki Brennan

Transcript for the third Smart Grrl Summer episode:

PDF transcript & digital transcript!

Shownotes:

Smart Grrl Summer is the project of killjoys and killjoys always work in communities. This time, we welcomed Dr. Vicki Brennan to the pod!

Prof. Brennan is Associate Professor of Religion and Director of African Studies Program at the University of Vermont. She’s an award-winning professor who writes and teaches about questions of sound, materiality, ethics, and religion in Africa and the African Diaspora. Vicki is an anthropologist by training and so her research is often ethnographic; her first book, Singing Yoruba Christianity (Indiana UP, 2018; assigned for homework!), examines how some church members in Lagos, Nigeria use music, dance, and other material forms as a means of producing moral community, reinforcing ethical values, and self-making. She is also a member of the Sacred Writes 2019 inaugural public scholarship training cohort.

Some new keywords this time! Find them in our glossary. They were:

• soundscape, acoustemology

The 101:

This whole episode is an excuse to let Vicki teach Ilyse & Megan about sound, what we miss when we (admittedly) skip sound as a framework for thinking about religion, and how we might reimagine sound, soundscapes, methods, and sensory information broadly within our own work and the study of religion writ large.

Vicki told us that, fairly basically: One of the ways in which religious people claim space, create community, and do religion is through sound. So, all her research pays attention to the sounds around us and how we might categorize them as “religious” or “not religious.” On top of that, then, what that categorization might mean—where those categorizations come from—are vital approaches when studying religion in a way that foregrounds sound.

This might be singing or musicking—obvious ways in. But Vicki also reminded us that “sound” is all of the things that religious people do with the human voice: praying, chanting, even just communicating—think about a sermon, or an invocation. While the meanings of the words being sung or spoken are important, Vicki taught us, so too are the sounds of those words being uttered. Then in addition to all of those sounds that we might understand as being deliberately made as part of religious practice (like, the music or speech), there are also what we might think of as ambient sounds that are not often explicitly acknowledged or recognized but that form some of the texture of religious practice. This is a soundscape.

Some resources on soundscapes:

• Vicki strongly suggests Marinna Guzy’s work, especially a 2-part, totally accessible series called “The Sound of Life: What is a Soundscape?” via Smithsonian Folklife.

  • Part 1 is here and

  • Part 2 there.

• Charles Hirshkind’s work is a Vicki-approved classic: The Ethnical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006).

• Ilyse also recommends a book chapter by Vicki! (It taught really well in a theories of religion class!): “Senwele Jesu: Gospel Music and Religious Publics in Nigeria.” New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa, Rosalind Hackett and Benjamin Soares, eds., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 227-244.

Then, Vicki legit broke Megan’s brain by talking about the mechanics of sound and hearing. Vicki was absolutely clear that for hearing and non-hearing folks alike, sound is a way we process the world around us, because sound is vibration—it is felt in the body even if we each feel that (i.e., in our bodies, whether as “hearing” or not) differently.

Vicki talked about how our ear hair actually makes the noise we hear; so hearing is a representation of noise. Here’s the science on that:

• A. James Hudspeth, “The Energetic Ear,” available (pdf and slides to go along) here.

Science reading not your thing? No worries, Vicki has you covered. She assigned sound artist Jacob Kierkegaard, who’s piece Labrynthitis draws on the science of hearing:

• Labyrinthitis (2007)

So, why do we care that our ear hairs do work and that ears aren’t just, like, big funnels for True Sound Happening Over There? As Vicki argues: because, like most human sensory perception, sound is subjective experience (because our ears actually produce the sounds that we then “hear”) that is only made sensible through reference to external cultural systems—like language, history, religion, institutions, and so on. 

Sound, Vicki teaches us, is & can be studied as a way of being in and knowing the world. This is what anthropologist Steven Feld calls “acoustemology,” or “acoustic knowing.” (As in: acoustic epistemology.)

• Vicki recommends a really readable & open-access piece (if a bit old!) by Feld: “From Ethnomusicology to Echo-Muse-Ecology: Reading R. Murray Schafer in the Papua New Guinea Rainforest,” The Soundscape Newsletter, Number 08., June, 1994.

Vicki also taught us about sound as social—as a key and foundational way folks create community and connect people to the values and practices central to communities. Like, culturally but also physiologically connected. Did y’all know that neuroscientists have shown how people’s heartbeats become coordinated while singing in a choir?

Vicki brought it back to a foundational thinker in religion, sociology, and anthropology: Émile Durkheim. She argued that sound, and specifically participation in things like music, is central to Durkheim’s argument about the social force of religion. If you read Durkheim, his discussion—especially around his famous conceptualization of “collective effervescence”—is shot through with sound as crucial to experiences where the social is felt—for Durkheim, sound and events that cause effervescence may be a commotion, may be noisy, but it is also coordinated. It is disciplined, it is disciplining, and, as Vicki argues, it makes subjects, communities, cultures. 

• Jia Tolentino’s piece in The New Yorker, “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston,” gets at the collective effervescence and sound and sociality (and is a stunning read).

We asked Vicki what we miss by skipping sound within our work. Vicki pulled no punches and said:

“Sound complicates the category of religion itself. So much of modern categories like religion have been shaped by the emphasis on visuality as a primary sense for knowing the world (this oversimplifies a bit). Western knowledge, mind-body relationships, trusting of visuality over other senses. So much of our thinking about religion has been shaped by this.”

Vicki named sound—and sensuality broadly—as an element that a racist, Eurocentric system ignores because it does not fit within modes of knowledge. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a form of knowledge—just one that Western scholarship, including in the study of religion, has ignored, devalued, and shunted to the side.

The take home? Sound plus an awareness of sound is how people interpret their experiences. But this doesn’t come from nowhere, it is an awareness and an interpretation that takes place in relation to cultural and social norms, values, systems—all the stuff of religion. So, of course sound is vital to the study of religion!

Primary Sources:

Ilyse talked about the way she heard the soundscape of Chennai and Delhi, India as chaotic during her very first trip there, but also how the noises she could make—like teeth sucking—communicated a familiarity, a “trustworthiness” to her host families (and long time friends) far beyond learning proper grammar and vocabulary ever did.

Megan talked about Sacred Harp and shape note singing.

Vicki shared how music has been present her whole life but also how she got started on thinking about religion, sound, and music and community as a chamber musician.

Your homework:

Some of this we mentioned and some of this is just a set of resources Vicki compiled for us (in addition to the above—every link is hers!) to make thinking and learning about sound easier—as well as teaching with or about it a snap!

Vicki told us our homework was to listen & listen hard. Pay attention to how we listen, what we tune out, what we think of as background, as foreground, as important, as annoying, as noise vs. sound, as religious vs. not. Listen, she said. So listen we must.

She also (again, in addition to the above) suggested we read:

• Ashon Crawley’s lyrical The Lonely Letters; 

• Alisha Lola Jones’s work on masculinity and voice in the Black church is available in a ton of formats, including:

  • Interview on Left of Black with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal

  • Her brand new book, Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (OUP: 2020).

  • On NPR, “Lift Every Voice”

• And Vicki told us to check out the “Religion” Category on Sounding Out, a set of digital scholarship (writing, sound, podcasts, and more) about sound!

Ilyse and Megan, shocking no one, insist you learn more from Vicki! She’s smart, she’s easy to read, she’s got other podcasts, she’s crushing it.

• Singing Yoruba Christianity (Indiana UP, 2018)

• on Classical Ideas Podcast with Greg Soden: EP 161, “Yoruba Christianity and Music with Dr. Vicki Brennan”

• & she’s on the board of American Religious Sounds, which is a project you should check out

Hear, hear: listen, listen, listen! Listen hard!