Sound Pools: Cultural Polyphony in Sound and Music

This article explores some of the ‘texts that have fled’ from cultivated sound and music through the conscious and unconscious strategic signifiers employed by musicians, shamans and artists. Written from the perspective of an artist with a music, performance and literary background, the author contemplates the workings of sound upon the mind and the body as explored in music, science, magic and art. These explorations are offered within a framework of sound spaces or ‘audiotopias’ – sound as physical, psychological and cultural places. Flowing centrally through the text is an argument that likens cultural polyphony in sound and music to genetic diversity in human evolution – the expansion of the gene pool. Recent theories in neuroscience claim that the creation and use of music by early humans is adaptive rather than a byproduct of language as was accepted by previous scientific arguments. The collection of all possible differences would constitute the sonic utopia, a task never to be exhausted and never complete. The author discusses how these notions manifest themselves in her own artistic production strategies as well as several other related socio-cultural examples.