There was no-one else around, but it was not quiet.

They were so busy in that rusty corrugated iron shed. I could hear radio 1, and creeking, scraping and whining machinery. They were laughing. I think they mended boats; I have no understanding of what that would involve.

We don’t always notice other people’s work spaces; some are public and yet hidden, but sounds call our attention to work activity and give us clues as to what people are doing even when they cannot be seen.

In light of this, and my own interest in sound, I began to consider the aurality of our working lives. There is a disparate literature exploring the relationship between music at work, either through music as a cultural aide, as seen in Nissley et al’s (2002) study of company songs, or the role of music in the domination – or subversion – of workspace (e.g. Lanza, 2004; Korczynski and Jones, 2006). However, music is ‘tamed sound’, often intrinsically linked to some form of production (Attali, 2006), and has been created and packaged prior to contributing to one’s sonic environment. In comparison, sound is ‘live’: it can be affected and have an effect the social setting; it is a response and an initiator, improvised or fleeting, imbued with meaning but also transcending a dimension of knowing by having subconscious or other effects at a sensual level. The exciting potentials of exploring these dimensions in relation to work have already been discussed by a few organizational scholars, though published work is rarely found. For example, Corbett (2003) has demonstrated sound and hearing were part of the organizing process as far back as the middle ages, whilst Kociatkiewicz and Kostera (2003: 308) challenge the concept of ‘no sound’ being defined in only negative terms through exploring the role of silence in one IT firm. Such studies not only highlight the inseparability of sound and silence, both being forms of ‘noise’ and reliant on one another, but challenge us to look towards an acoustimology of work.

We only have to reflect on our own experiences to see the potential avenues waiting to be heard. As I write this, I can hear the frantic tapping of my colleague next door (she seems to be far more productive that I am…), the sound of someone in the gents — sometimes, but not always, followed by the sound of water running out of the taps, and the buzz of my faulty lamp that shows little sign of being replaced. Becoming excited about the potential of exploring the aurality of working lives, I decided to ask a number to people to record their day at work. This was met with hesitation: not only did they fear that this might involved some tricky negotiations with their colleagues, but they found the idea of anyone having to listen back to recording of eight or more hours of ‘banal boring blah‘; a form of tedium previously unknown to man. As an alternative, they were asked to record ‘going to work’, setting the recorder running when they started to think about work (for most, as soon as they got up) and switch it off when they decided that they were ‘at work’ (although many chose to leave it running until the digital recording space ran out). After receiving the recording and listening to it over and over, I met up with each of the ‘co-composers’ a number of times where we either listened and discussed the recording together or I asked questions within a more conventional research interaction. Through both aural and qualitative analysis, soundscapes for each ‘going to work’ episode were recorded. Here are two of them: journey to work 1
journey to work 2.

Of course, soundscapes have a long history in research interventions. The work of early pioneers of the exploring sound and the environment, notably R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and musicologist whose seminal series ‘World Soundscape Project: The Acoustics of the Environment (1971), signalled a new way of thinking about the environment through the medium of music by considering what constituted noise in over 200 communities across the world. Murray argues the ‘acoustic identity’ of people’s daily lives was been taken over by the mass of industrial noise to the detriment of their wellbeing. Cities across the developed world, that have uniqueness in their geography, landscapes, architecture and people are becoming increasingly homogenised aurally, acoustic ‘non-places’, to use Augé’s (1995) term. In order to acknowledge our responsibility within (and to) our sonic environment, Schafer argues we must consider ourselves as the audience, the performer and the composer simultaneously (1977: 205) In order to explore his ideas further, Schafer went on a mission to ‘hear Vancouver’ with an acoustic stroll through the city.

I feel far more attached to my own collection of soundscapes than any other research project. It is tempting (and of course inevitable) that I will have to at some point accompany them with the textual-based analysis that I undertook when composing them, should I wish to extol the virtues of using soundscapes as a medium for exploring working life. However, beyond being a lens through which to explore other phenomena, I have found that the soundscapes have allowed me to not only think about the representation of sound, but the expressive experience of sound, something that now makes me hesitant to erase the noise I encounter in my other research interactions.

References

1. Attali, J. (2006) Noise: The Political Economy of Music, London: University of Minestota Press.
2. Augé, M. (1995) Non-places, introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, London: Verso.
3. Corbett, J.M. (2003) ‘Sound organisation: A brief history of psychosonic management’, Ephemera 3(4): #1
4. Kociatkiewicz, J. and M. Kostera (2003) ‘Shadows of Silence’, Ephemera 3(4): #5.
5. Hopfl, H. (2000) ‘The aesthetic approach in organization studies’, in S. Linstead and H. Höpfl (eds) The Aesthetics of Organization, London: Sage, pp. 13–34
6. Hancock, P. (2003) ‘Beautiful untrue things — Aestheticizing the corporate culture industry’, in A. Carr and P. Hancock (eds) Art and Aesthetics at Work, Basingstoke : Palgrave, pp. 174 — 194
7. Korczynski, M. and Jones, K. (2006) ‘‘Instrumental Music? The Social Origins of Broadcast Music in British Factories, Popular Music, 25(2): 145–164.
8. Lanza, J. (2004) Elevator Music A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
9. Nissley, N. S.S. Taylor and O. Butler (2002) ‘The power of organizational song: An organizational discourse an aesthetic expression of organizational culture’, Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science 2(1), pp. 47–62.
10. Schafer, R.M (1977) The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World . Vermont: Rochester.
11. Strati, A. (2000) ‘The aesthetic approach in organization studies’, in S. Linstead and H. Höpfl (eds) The Aesthetics of Organization, London: Sage, pp. 13–34

In tune

I recently went to the workshop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was taking his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and otherwise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attending to the finish rather than the sound. Apparently there is value in layers of varnish and Roger is cautious. It seems to me that he’s sort of ‘reading the wood’ as he looks at the instrument, and he knows not to touch where he can’t be sure of the impact of changing something. ‘No, you wouldn’t want to do that…’ he concludes.

Waiting

The workshop is an extraordinary place for an outsider. There are pieces of instruments all around the single room, sections and strings and bridges and necks, and a pan of glue on the boil on an old camping stove. I can’t take it all in, and I can’t see how Roger manoeuvres his way through the arrangement of objects. As well as making new instruments, what he does here is to work on things produced through the craftsmanship of others, undoing and remaking them. It takes a careful eye and a trained ear, an understanding of the whole process of creating a double bass, a lot of patience and dexterity, and a kind of respect it seems to me. He’s not an old man but he’s been doing this for a long time already. Several years ago, he decided to take a break. ‘I tried being a driving instructor,’ he said. ‘I lasted a year.’ When he was doing his apprenticeship, the man who taught him had already told him his future: ‘You’ll never do anything else.’ And here he is, in his own workshop, in tune with his instruments.

The narrator in Billie Jo Spears’ 1969 country song Mr Walker it’s all Over could have done with some female colleagues like Dolly, Lily and Jane. ‘I don’t like the New York Secretary’s life’, and who can blame her, when it’s too full of men, from the company president on down, with hands ‘reaching out to grab the things that I consider mine’. So she’s heading back to Garden City, Kansas, because ‘the boy next door don’t know it but come June he’s gonna gain himself a wife’. A late-1960s experiment with women working in the big city is here doomed to failure, and an earlier femininity is reasserted.

Step into the Office Baby by Belle and Sebastian is also about office politics and sexual harassment. Here, the roles are reversed, as we might expect in a post-feminist world. She says

We need to talk
Step into my office, baby
I want to give you the job
A chance of overtime
Say my place at nine

He, though, isn’t sure. He’s ‘a slave to work’, he’s ‘only living when I walk amongst office staff’. And he’s not sure that he wants the sort of overtime she has in mind.

She wants him to sharpen up, be a man, complete with retro phallic necktie.

I've got to change my ways
Dress for business every day
A sharp suit and a kipper tie
A big arrow pointing to my fly

It’s not just the inversion of heteronormative expectations that’s notable in the contrast between Mr Walker and Step into the Office, it’s the meaning of private sphere. In 1969, she could escape back home, where her mom and her man will save her. In 2003, he has nowhere to hide: his own place isn’t a sanctuary from work, but a place where work is in his head ‘in bed by nine, my thoughts composed’, and he succumbs to the office affair, goes to her place to ‘take down her little red dress’. The office is no escape from sexual politics.