The photographs in the presentation are extracts from the two works I made. One, “Every Night The Same” reflected the experience of having the same dream, night after night, and the experience of seeing only a part of a place as big as a university: however long I work there, it’s never graspable. I can capture only a glimpse. What I see is repeated, though not replicated elsewhere, in the straight lines of buildings, and blinds, and crushed cardboard. These images were shot on my Canon F1, 50mm lens using Kodak black and white film, 3200iso at ankle height, 13th Feb 2011.

The second work, “Actual Occasions”, used Impossible Project film for a polaroid camera. Polaroid doesn’t make film for its cameras any more, and so Impossible have tried to work out how. They haven’t quite got it right, and so the photos are unstable, full of light leaks and odd shadows. That suits this project admirably, as the properties of the things that are shot are not stable. “Actual Occasions” is taken from Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, which seems to me to argue that events and objects are not fixed and immutable but create moments of time and space, which are then experienced by other actual occasions. These other occasions involve a recurrence of experiences, times and spaces. Objects therefore, have something of a life themselves.

A few other images are present in this slideshow, and they’re interspersed with dreams recorded by staff and students at the university. Even the most nightmarish dream sounds funny written down, and it’s not surprising that many dreams are about work.

Thanks to Michael Halewood for the commission and the curation.

The space at San Benedetto is clearly structured, with solid marble counters and displays arranged in aisles and around the edges of the hall. The floor is very clean and dry, unusually so for a fish market. (For a contrasting account of London’s fish market, see A Day’s Work at Billingsgate.) There is a large variety of Mediterranean fish but to my surprise, some Atlantic fish too, such as sole or salmon. There was local sole too, if a little smaller. It was quite literally still flapping around on the counter. No need to check the eyes to assess the freshness of that! There’s a distinction between sellers of shellfish, wet fish, smoked, and frozen which I assume is part of the regulatory structure (and is common in other places too). There’s quite a range from large to small fish, from what’s considered to be prestigious to the ordinary: swordfish, tuna, bream, bass, gurnard, mullet, mackerel and much more. The shellfish includes local prawns, arselle (a type of clam found locally), small green crabs, the occasional lobster, mussels, and a kind of snail. Plus bottarga of course, the dried roe of mullet (or tuna), something Sardinia is famous for, ground to add to spaghetti, or bought whole then cut into small pieces and dressed with oil and lemon as an antipasto.

When I asked where specific fish came from, I was not only told that something was ‘Sarda’ but that it was caught off a particular stretch of coast at Villasimius or Cagliari for example. There’s a code that’s used uniformly in the displays that explains not only the country of provenance of the fish, but also whether it was caught at sea or farmed. Last week at a smaller market in Cagliari, I bought a local octopus and a squid from the Atlantic, probably near South Africa the fishmonger said, but brought in by air and on ice (but not frozen). (I didn’t ask the ‘where did it come from’ question until afterwards and hadn’t yet worked out the code…) I’m interested in the ‘length’ of the socio-economic process that brings fish from sea to table but hadn’t expected to see the produce of both such a short and a long one literally alongside one another in my local market…

Instead of taking pictures on my first visit to the main market at San Benedetto (it would have felt intrusive and I wanted to just look first), I decided to do a short (one minute) recording while walking around which you can listen to here: san benedetto 1 oct 2010. The recording highlights the presence of three distinct layers of sound that it’s hard to distinguish between when hearing them in real time (Makagon and Neumann, 2008). There is a low murmur of people talking, a collective sound in which it’s not possible to identify specific exchanges. There are knives being sharpened, a high-pitched screech that conjures up the image of a large blade. And there are the fishmongers making their sales pitches, playfully at times, and as much for the amusement of their peers as in an attempt to gain custom it seems. Indeed, humour is an integral part of the life of the market (Porcu, 2005). ‘Venga che imbroglio anche a lei!’ one exclaims provocatively. Come on so I can rip you off too!

There’s already a great selection of photographs of the fish market, the fishmongers and customers here (most of the first half are of the fish section, the rest of other parts of the market). And for close-ups of the fish, click here. And I expect I’ll be writing more about all this after my next visit…

References
1. Makagon, D and M Neumann (2008) Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience. London: Sage.
2. Porcu, L (2005) ‘Fishy business: Humour in a Sardinian fish Market’, Humour 18(1): 69–102.

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.