Introduction and Background
The Witness Blanket (TWB) is a multimedia sculpture made by Master Carver and Indigenous scholar Carey Newman as a memorial to the children, families, and communities impacted by Canada’s Indian residential school system. TWB features hundreds of artifacts donated by Survivors as well as items recovered from the premises of former residential and day schools across Canada. When constructing TWB, Newman meticulously pieced items together to resemble a blanket, making sure that every cut was intentional. The visual metaphor of a blanket was chosen to invoke feelings of comfort in those who experienced it. The sociopolitical context of TWB references contemporary issues of crucial significance in Canada: reconciliation, Indigenous sovereignty, and the deconstruction of remaining colonial narratives—but above all, TWB is a beautiful and powerful work of art.
As is true of both ethnography and art, the influence of the researcher and artist respectively leave impressions on the work, sometimes in subtle ways and in others more pronounced. My role in TWB Virtual Reality (VR) project is multifaceted; I am researching, designing, and creating sound. An awareness of my own background and the ways it influences what and how I hear will allow me to be more purposeful about the traces I leave, while also taking into consideration how creative choices I make could be received by others.
My connection to the artist and to the piece
In my Master’s-level work, I wanted to study the emotional power of sound and work with technology that uses that power to foster cultural understanding and build empathy. This led me to Virtual Reality (VR) and spatial audio recording. Spatial audio is the most significant technical innovation in the audio world since the shift from mono to stereo. The possible uses for this technology are far-reaching, from games and films to medical training applications. I wanted to leverage the potential of spatial audio to create depth of presence in the service of connecting people with others, with themselves, as well as to topics that might otherwise seem emotionally inaccessible, as a means of studying the relationship between sound, emotion, and cultural memory.
One of my advisors, Kirk McNally, knew Carey Newman, the artist of TWB. Kirk’s partner, Kirstie Hudson, wrote a book with Carey about the making of TWB. When I expressed an interest in VR to Kirk, he told me about TWB, and I was immediately interested in contributing in whatever way I could. I watched a documentary about the making of TWB, and while the subject matter detailing the atrocities committed against Indigenous children was incredibly grim, I found the project emotionally captivating and knew instantly that I wanted to be an ally. The use of a blanket as a visual analogy in the sculpture to call forward comforting associations and a sense of protection is especially poignant considering the individual materials contained within the blanket are antithetical to those sentiments—they are specters of ethnic violence from colonial powers, imbued with pain, have witnessed the suffering of children, seen, heard, and known horrors. And yet, when considered together, they can humanize inconceivable cruelty, transmuting it into beauty.
While watching the documentary, I was reminded of an item I saw while visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel. Like residential schools, the Holocaust is another horrific tragedy with a magnitude difficult to comprehend. In order to fully grasp the gravity and scope of tragedies such as these, numbers need to be humanized. How does one conceptualize the pain and suffering of millions? I remember the story of an object I saw at the museum, a shattered pair of eyeglasses with a small placard beside it telling the story of a little girl who, upon arriving at Auschwitz, was separated from her mother on the train platform. Her mother, she found out later, was sent directly to the gas chamber and was dead within an hour of arriving. While the little girl was being processed into the camp and forced to undress, she discovered that her mothers’ eyeglasses had somehow ended up in her coat pocket. It was all she had left of her mother, so she hid them for years. Through many hiding places and travel to multiple camps, the eyeglasses broke into dozens of tiny pieces, all of which she kept carefully hidden away. After the war, she donated what remained of the glasses to Yad Vashem.
That story hit me in a visceral way; the very thought of it still brings tears to my eyes. I think of all of the pain and sorrow those eyeglasses knew, the power of memory contained by that object, amazed by the ability of something inanimate to represent so much life and sorrow at the same time. I was reminded of that story while I watched the documentary about TWB, and I haven’t even had an opportunity to see the piece in person yet. I can only imagine the individual stories of the lives of children and their families woven into its blanket.
Nature of My Relationship with the Artist
I am immensely grateful for the support and guidance I have in this project, not only from two advisors–one from music technology and the other anthropology–but I also have the honor of working collaboratively with TWB artist himself, Carey Newman, throughout the entire process. Without this close alliance with Carey, I would not feel comfortable attempting this project. As I suggested previously, we hear and perceive the world differently based on our own experiences, so I couldn’t conceive of any other way of approaching this than with the artist through every step.
In design discussions with Carey, I expressed trepidation about making decisions about sound without his input, uncomfortable with my unavoidable presence and influence on the resulting experience. To reassure me, Carey shared stories of similar fears he faced in the early stages of the Blanket’s construction. He felt guilty about taking apart and cutting items which held so much emotional and sentimental value. However, as he recounted to me, accepting his role as artist meant making decisions that served the Blanket as a whole. In this way, Carey encouraged me to accept my part in service of the project rather than apologize for my presence, which could not be avoided, even if that was the goal. Instead, I’ve sought to develop a more acute awareness of my own positionality in order to work skillfully with the traces I leave. In the same way Carey made every cut intentional while constructing TWB, I am approaching the audio production by bringing intention into every sound.
Adapting to My Own Positionality
Before I could begin working with Carey on the design, I needed to first examine carefully the factors that impact my own hearing, not only to account for my own influence, but also to consider how others might hear and experience the piece differently based on their own positionality. In other words, I needed to understand how we listen before planning what we would hear.
Who am I to be acting as this pivotal node in the sensory communication of such an intimate, contentious, and inescapably Canadian subject? I am neither Canadian, nor am I Indigenous; I’m an American. I’m also Jewish and non-binary, so I’m no stranger to marginalization. Perhaps that allows me to have more empathy, but maybe this intersection of cultural factors could also serve other purposes, such as bestowing me with a unique and nuanced perspective which I can apply to my work. In this project, the pertinent question is how my listening positionality, the intersection of cultural influences, colours what I hear and will later produce.
Allow me to disclose the makeup of my own positionality in order to shed some light on what I bring to this project and the origins of my perspective. Both sides of my family trace their roots back to the same part of Eastern Europe, to the area that is modern-day Poland and Ukraine. Both sides fled to the United States to escape religious persecution in the early 1900’s. They were fortunate enough to have made it to the US before the Holocaust, but they watched in horror what happened to the Jews of Europe and passed that fear on to their children. I was raised with the kind of intergenerational trauma that can only come from hundreds of years of being hunted down, an ingrained fear of their communities turning against them, and a constant vigilance, lest it ever happen again. I was taught to never outstay my welcome, to keep my beliefs to myself, and was reminded regularly that most of the world hated me, without even needing to meet me, simply because of my ethnic heritage.
I was born and raised in Palo Alto, California, before the Internet turned it into Silicon Valley. Back then, it was just a college town–albeit a prestigious one. Between Stanford and the proximity to San Francisco, I grew up in a fairly diverse environment, both culturally and ethnically, and had access to many artistic traditions of the world. I always knew that I was different, and if I ever forgot, the perfectly manicured social norms epitomized by Palo Alto crept in to remind me that I didn’t belong. I turned to music to find solace and catharsis, writing and performing my first song when I was just six years old. However, in spite of my precociousness, a learning disability made reading sheet music incredibly challenging and I was discouraged from pursuing music. My interests shifted instead to culture, particularly Tibetan culture. I began studying Tibetan Buddhism at the age of twelve and traveled to Nepal and Tibet for the first time when I was fifteen. The time I spent in South Asia fundamentally changed the course of my life, my perspective on the world, and how I move through it.
I carried my passion for South Asian culture into my undergraduate work which focused on semiotic theory, linguistic anthropology, and South Asian history, language, culture, and religion. A strange twist of fate while on a research trip to India to study Hindi led me to Bollywood. My personal interest in circus performance and flow arts took me to Mumbai, where I spun fire in Bollywood music videos and taught Hindi to the diplomats who worked in the Israeli Consulate. This was 2009, shortly after the bombings. This may have been the first time in my life that I was respected for my niche cultural knowledge, as there were very few who understood both Indian and Israeli culture as intimately as I did.
This phase of my life served as inspiration for the music I would later create, combining electronic music production with classical North Indian instrumentation. I spent nearly a decade producing music and touring the world playing at festivals and dance clubs. I never dreamed I would find a way to bring these worlds together, until I found this project, an instance requiring knowledge of both anthropology and music technology.
However, my ‘otherness’ has at times made it difficult to feel worthy of positions of power, as is the case with my role in this project. As an awkward child of the eighties and nineties, constantly battling with gender norms in an intensely transphobic era, instilled in me an aversion for public-facing roles in which I felt I needed to constantly explain myself. I don’t think I fully realized how my journey of discovering my true gender identity impacted my work or certainly the way I listen until I began working with TWB. In meetings with Carey and the rest of the VR design team, I was made aware of a tendency I have to over-apologize and downplay my input. I believe this was a product of my upbringing, of the fear of antisemitism that my parents taught me, thinking they were protecting me. It also came from gender roles and expectations around the behaviour of women that were forced upon me, though I did not know at the time that there were other expressions of gender identity. This made me acutely aware of what it feels like to be ‘othered’; experiences which ultimately made me a more adept researcher, having been a student of culture already most of my life in order to find my own way of adapting to the expectations of dominant culture.
How does this influence how and what I hear, you might ask? It’s a question whose answer requires an interdisciplinary approach to unpack. Drawing primarily from anthropology but also from musicology, sound studies, and technical research on audiovisual techniques and theory, I have begun the process of examining what has influenced my own listening, and incorporating my findings into the design process that follows.
Literature Review
Acoustemology. Coined by anthropologist Steven Feld, the term combines acoustics with epistemology to describe a way of knowing through sound. Feld refers to these dynamics as “[…] a knowing-in-action: a knowing-with and knowing-through the audible”. Including action in the definition acknowledges the active nature of listening itself. It is an ongoing process which is inherently relational and discursive, based upon an implied description of present experience rather than arriving at a singular equivocal conclusion. Feld explains how the participatory nature of sounding and listening requires interaction of sounds with each other as well as with those listening. Acoustemology is therefore relational, involving and describing both the process of producing sound as well as listening to it, and in so doing, can only be described in relation to that which surrounds whatever is being described. In other words, the circumstances of the auditory experience are fluid, relying upon changing conditions.
In Feld’s acoustemology, sound lacks intrinsic insight, but is instead considered with how sound relates to the rest of the audible world. Nothing can be learned from an individual sound source alone, it must be treated holistically with its context. The term also implies an affiliation with the field of phenomenology through its description of sensory experience. Acoustemology is therefore both a methodological perspective as well as a study. In a recent interview with Steven Feld about acoustemology, Tom Rice (date?) inquired as to the dual function of the term, asking whether acoustemology could function independently of culture or if it might also function more instinctually, similar to the phenomenological perspective. Feld sidestepped the question, essentially admitting that he himself was unsure of the distinction and considered it an evolving conversation between anthropology and philosophy.
Acoustemology is a rich theoretical framework which is used frequently in my research on TWB, however, on the subject of time, I diverge from Feld. He addresses time indirectly through discussions of how bird sounds change according to the time of day, but he does not consider time in relation to its impact on the dynamics of the sound itself. The perspective on time I’m talking about comes from a musical understanding of how sound moves and changes with time. I believe this is a shortcoming shared by phenomenology and even epistemology, because they are still filtered through thought and therefore through language, which itself is limited in its ability to accurately describe the present experience because it is inherently referential. Ferdinand de Saussure described the linguistic ‘I’ having no meaning because in the moment of sounding, the ‘I’ to which the speaker was referring exists in a different time and space . The goal, therefore, cannot be to describe the present moment which is limited by language and its myopic treatment of sound as the means rather than a result.
In TWB, sounds are the product of interactions whereby the sound serves to animate artifacts whose stories cannot be heard by human ears [elements]. In this way, sound can give life, agency, emotion, and nuance to artifacts, literally giving them a voice, an auditory translation that allows it to be understood by people. From the perspective of music, time presents less of a challenge than it does with language. Time is what contextualizes sound by considering the timing of individual sounds with respect to each other within a song, or a single audio clip within the sonic environment of TWB.
Transductive Anthropology. The term soundscape is used broadly across many disciplines, and yet, problematically, its roots are in contemplative aesthetics and objectification. There are many within anthropology, sound studies, and to a lesser extent in musicology, who actively encourage the adoption of alternative terms. Tied to the concept of soundscape is that of immersion which has similarly dubious intentions at its foundation. Among the scholars urging the use of new terminology is Stefan Helmreich, who writes about the problematic history associated with soundscape, and by association, issues with the word immersion as well. “The soundscape is shadowed by an acoustemology of space as given and listener as both apart from the world and immersed in it […] the soundscape has become haunted by the notion of immersion—the arrival of listeners at a sense of being at once emplaced in space and, at times, porously continuous with it”. Rather than a soundscape, he describes transduction resulting in a sound-state, which he defines as, “ […] a zone of sonic immanence and intensity” . Helmreich offers an alternative conception of the researcher as a transducer, and rather than the desired state of ‘immersion,’ he offers ‘transduction,’ which he defines as, “ […] the transmutation and conversion of signals across media that, when accomplished seamlessly, can produce a sense of effortless presence.”
Helmreich draws attention to crucially important shortfalls of other theories, especially with respect to space. However, while he states that transduction may help in thinking about “the temporality of sound’s duration” , like Feld, he is treating sound as the source and time as a constraint on the sound, the same way one might think about room size being a factor determining reverb. Neither directly addresses how the reception or perception of time varies based upon experience and impacts how the sound is heard.
Critical listening positionality. Building on what Feld posits regarding the reflexive nature of sounding and listening, the idea of critical listening positionality presented by Dylan Robinson in his book, “Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies,” adds the consideration of intersectional critical race theory with acoustemology, taking into account the ways in which race, class, and gender influence what and how we hear. This approach diverges from Feld’s by considering other sociocultural dynamics that impact listening.
“As part of our listening positionality, we each carry listening privilege, listening biases, and listening ability that are never wholly positive or negative; by becoming aware of normative listening habits and abilities, we are better able to listen otherwise…Critical listening positionality thus seeks to prompt questions regarding how we might become better attuned to the particular filters of race, class, gender, and ability that actively select and frame the moment of contact between listening body and listened-to sound.”
Robinson describes how improving awareness of the power dynamics imposed through colonialism and its aftereffects will allow for increased understanding of how these issues impact the experience of sound and the audible world at large. This point is critical in my thesis work, in understanding my own critical listening positionality and how that plays into what I create with Carey, but also taking into consideration how others will receive the work differently, incorporating these concepts into the experience itself.
Locating Myself in the Project
While heed given to theoretical frameworks is necessary and helpful to train perspective, applying the theory to the fieldwork is rarely if ever straightforward–it’s messy and meandering. I believe flexibility of thinking is required of an anthropologist in general, but certainly with this research. As an empirical discipline, anthropology requires fieldwork. In the case of this project, my fieldwork is twofold, based one part in research to provide context and to hint at intention for creative decision-making, but also in the creation of sounds themselves. In light of the interdisciplinary nature of the project, the work itself is where all of this plays out. The most compelling aspect of this experience is the opportunity to coproduce with the artist. I get to learn about the context and consideration behind artistic decisions and can collaborate about how to communicate those intentions into the sound for the VR adaptation.
The goal is not to erase myself from the result, but to acknowledge my impact and truly to step into my role as a creative collator. The collaboration brings greater understanding and nuance to those who will experience TWB in VR, but the more I understand about what influences me, the more intentional I can be with the traces I leave in not only this project, but all of my future work. Robinson writes about the “civilizing sensory paradigm” imposed by Canadian Residential Schools and how this colonial framework can be dismantled through what he calls “culturally immersive learning environments.” This is the ultimate goal of this project: to use TWB in the medium of VR to promote understanding through what I’ve been referring to as reciprocal listening.
There are many types of listening, different ways of perceiving the same physiological sensory data. A producer does not listen to a song in the same way as the composer, or for someone who might be hearing the song for the first time. I arrived at the concept of reciprocal listening to describe another way to examine the dynamics of sounding and listening. While acoustemology can describe the function of sound in communicating knowledge, it is dynamic, but not reciprocal; it doesn’t account for listening. Nor does critical listening positionality take into account the interactive relationship of human and nonhuman agents engaged in mutually sounding and listening.
The name of the piece itself, The Witness Blanket, reminds us of what these objects have and continue to witness. While the items may be static in some respects, bound to each other and their respective forms, they still have agency, as they play an active role in the listening process. The blanket listens to the visitors listening to the blanket and in so doing, collectively listens to the individual stories it protects and comforts. Take for example one of the most iconic artifacts featured in TWB, a child’s shoe that was found in a forest adjacent to an abandoned residential school in Carcross, Yukon Territory. When Carey received the shoe from the colleague who collected it, he was warned of its power. The colleague told Carey that every night since having the shoe in their possession, they’d had nightmares about running from something, and upon returning home without mentioning these dreams to their partner, they had the same nightmare. When handing over the shoe to Carey, they said that they couldn’t give it to him in good conscience without at least a warning.
That night, Carey took the shoe out of its box and held it. He recalled an immense feeling of sadness that washed over him as he held the shoe, and became emotional because he could feel its fear. He didn’t know what to do other than to try and comfort it. Out loud, he started talking about the project to the shoe, explaining to it why it had been picked up out of the forest and what would happen to it next. He did this every night for about a week until he could gradually feel it start to shift from fear to sadness. Carey was listening to the shoe, and the shoe was also listening to him. He recounted to me how the shoe felt different after each time he held and spoke to it, and that over time he had himself undergone a transformation through that process of listening. The shoe is now woven into The Witness Blanket, surrounded by medicine. The shoe is a witness that had experiences prior to being recovered. After its collection, it experienced compassion and healing through the process of Carey listening to and caring for it. Wrapped in medicine, the shoe listens.
To move forward with planning and design, I needed to think about how to combine these theoretical concepts and apply them to the production of sound and music for TWB. I will return again to the example of the shoe. What sound should the shoe make? A deceptively simple question with many possible answers. As the sound designer, it’s up to me to choose a sound as a medium for the shoe to use to communicate. The next logical question seems to be to ask what the shoe is trying to communicate. Is it a particular emotion or feeling? Or an experience or environment, perhaps where it was found? Which story does it want to share, and what kind of sound should be associated with that memory? For the shoe, how can I use sound to honour and validate its wearer and this echo of their memory?
In her book, A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online, author Jennifer Wemigwans describes the fundamental elements and perspectives shared among most Indigenous people; spirituality, grounded sense of place, an acknowledgement of the interconnectivity of all things, and an emphasis on reciprocity. How can I incorporate those ideas into sound for TWB? The sound of a child’s footsteps on dry leaves in a forest seemed to fit the consideration of both acoustemology and critical listening positionality, and it shares information with the listener about where the shoe is from and where it has been. This also provides an opportunity for reciprocal listening, as the shoe listens to the visitor listening to the shoe. This could be communicated through visual or haptic feedback as a glow or vibration of acknowledgement, something to indicate to the visitor that they too have been heard.
My ultimate goal with my participation in this project is to help those who experience TWB in VR to conceptualize their own listening positionality in a way that invites them to pause and consider both the importance of listening itself and the ways we can listen and witness. My hope is that experiences such as these humanize tragedy in a way that can truly reach people–to build empathy, and to make truth and reconciliation a reality.
Works Cited
Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, & Social Imagination. UBCPress: Vancouver, 2005.
Feld, Steven. “Acoustemology,” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny. Duke University Press, 2015. DOI: 10.1215/9780822375494
Helmreich, Stefan. “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography.” American Ethnologist 2007, 34(4): 621-641.
Rice, Tom and Steven Feld. “Questioning Acoustemology: an interview with Steven Feld.” Sound Studies 2021, 7(1): 119-132, DOI: 10.1080/20551940.2020.1831154
Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. A Course in General Linguistics. Open Court Publishing Company: Chicago, 1983.
Wemigwans, Jennifer. A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online. University of Regina Press, 2018.
Yad Vashem https://www.yadvashem.org/artifacts/museum/glasses.html accessed May 28, 2021