Seashell Sound
Perhaps all of us can relate to the experience of lifting a seashell up to our ear and listening to its sound that resembles that of the sea.
The scientific consensus is that the sound in the seashell is the result of the seashell's form on the air that is trapped in it. Because of the architecture of the shell, the air cannot escape its corpus. But the air cannot remain still either. As air molecules fluctuate, they produce sound that vibrates at frequencies that are resonant to the geometry of the shell.
In his essay “Seashell Sound”, Stefan Helmreich, quotes a poem by Amelia Welby:
Shell of the bright sea-waves!
What is it that we hear in thy sad moan?
Is this unceasing music all thine own?
Lute of the ocean-caves!
Or does some spirit dwell
In the deep windings of thy chambers dim
Breathing forever, in its mournful hymn,
Of ocean's anthem swell?
Helmreich here tells the reader of different scientific theories in various periods of literature, where the sound of the seashell when we bring it to our ear is explained as the sound of air, the ocean or as the sound of the blood circulation in the body of the listener.
Helmreich considers such discrepancy expressive of the intention of science in each given moment more than a manifestation of the truth of the seashell sound. Modernity, he claims, uses the language of science to disenchant and re-enchant as it finds convenient to fit its changing models of hearing, the world and the self.
Mythic Models of Seashell Sound
The seashell in the 19th century poetry that Helmreich examines, was a whisperer of secrets, a mouth, an ear, he tells us, or, quoting Robert Ryder: the seashell's sound is “the primordial murmurings of the universe”.
Different interpretations of what the seashell sound conveyed can be assigned under different mythic models.
Voices from the Past
Helmreich concludes in two mythic models of seashells in the literature he examines, one that considers seashells channels for voices from a communal past, and another that thinks of seashells as resonant chambers of individual experience.
According to Helmreich's case studies, English and American poets of the 19th century would speculatively discern the presence of speech in the sound of the seashells.
Many poets examined by Helmreich were implying that they could hear voices in the seashell sound and would often illustrate in their poetry how these voices belonged to ghosts from the distant past.
An Individual Experience
According to Helmholtz, it has been popular in poetry and in what he calls a prevailing trend of “folk acoustics” to reinforce the idea that the shells amplify the flow of the listener's bloodstream and that the sound we hear in them is not the sea, but instead it is the sound of our own body.
Eugene Lee-Hamilton manifests an example of this interpretation in his poem Sea-Shell Murmurs, 1883, where he says "the sea? it is the blood in our own veins, impetuous and near".
This kind of interpretation of seashell sound exemplifies a mythic model where the sounds of nature are manifestations of our individual experience.
Voices from the Future
But in William Wordsworth's poem "The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind", the poet calls the sound of the seashell as he brings it to his ear: "A loud prophetic blast of harmony". In this case, the voices the poet hears in the seashell come from the future.
In Sonic Utopias I was not interested in creating a mythic model that refers to the individual experience, nor a model that echoes voices from the communal past.
Instead, I hope that Sonic Utopias evokes a mythic model of the seashell as a channel for voices from a communal future.
Installation
For the Sonic Utopias installation five seashells were placed on a tray of sand, holding in their bowels another future narrative that can be listened to by bringing the shell close to our ear.
I collected the 5 seashells I needed for the Sonic Utopias installation on my trip to Greece in the summer of 2021, two months before the Ars Electronica campus exhibition. One belonged to my friends and I had put it in my ear to listen to the sea so many times in the past. Another was a present to my parents from our old fisherman neighbor, he had found it in the bottom of the sea. Another was a seashell I found in Berlin in the garden of my house years before I moved to Linz. And another two I searched and found in the Monastiraki flea market of Athens that summer.
Once I got all the shells and brought them to Linz, I soldered the tiniest speakers I found at Conrad and glued them to the interior of each shell-speaker. I also bought some wooden boards and cut them in a certain way to build the sand tray. I then made holes on the bottom part of the sandtray under each seashell and passed through them the cables that were coming out of each seashell-speaker. The cable was long enough to allow a tall person to bring the seashell to their ear and listen without having to crouch. I soldered the other side for each seashell onto an amplifier and glued the five amplifiers under the bottom of my sandtray. The audio cable that was coming out of my amplifiers was going into a jack input of a multichannel audio interface.
A raspberry Pi was connected to that same interface and was playing the five Sonic Utopias in a loop, one on each channel. The sandtray was standing on trestle legs. I set it all up at the center of the exhibition space so that people can move around it freely and so that it’s possible for up to five people to listen at the same time.
I glued a basket under the sandtray to hide all the cables. I wanted it to look a bit provisory like many DIY, improvised or poorly made constructions found in Greek beaches. Realism was also the purpose of the colorful cables sticking out of the sand. I wanted them to be reminiscent of the various disposed electronic objects that are slowly rusting in so many Greek beaches as they are devastated by poor public policies and overtourism.
Afterthoughts
I was happy with the way people received the artwork and with the way they interacted with the installation. I saw kids and old people have fun picking up each seashell and listening and passing shells to one another laughing. That was the playful experience and attitude I wanted to create.
What I would like to improve in the next iterations of the Sonic Utopias installation would be to make the stories visible with a graphic representation or a book to make sure that people can follow.
Another way to go would be to put some puffs where people could lie down and actually listen. But the truth is that that was supposed to be a glimpse of the narratives and if anyone would be interested they could listen online. The audience cannot spend too much time with any artwork in an exhibition. The format is more that of the flaneur/passerby from artwork to artwork. Picking up the seashell and holding it against one’s ear is anyway not that comfortable so no one would do it for as long as really needed to absorb an 1-hour long audioplay.
In the end the idea is that the stories are always there whether we listen to them or not. We can pick them up from a different moment in time and continue. Stories are told and retold and only sometimes we tune in and connect with them. Those are my favorite times and I think I shared them successfully with the people that visited the exhibition.
Using the practices of divination and animism through assigning speculatively the role of the oracle to the seashell, I think that I have managed to point towards the direction of the reenchantment of the world with this installation.
I hope my installation of the collaborative Sonic Utopias podcast points towards a way to use technologically mediated animism to nurture preferable futures.