How does the dark sound?

Abstract

Research on dark landscapes insists mostly on the sense of sight, as dark is primarily a seeable quality that comes as necessarily related to light. Nevertheless, in which ways darkness plays a role when it comes to the sonic apprehension of place, representations and experiences? This paper considers dark soundscapes, through filmic representation, firstly, by focusing on how sonic atmospheres of dark moments are staged in fiction. In so doing, it points out that darkness appears to be sounded by using some sonic effects such as desynchronization, ubiquity, reverb and clarity. The recurrent use of these effects shows that, beyond being staging techniques, they come along shared representations of how dark urban place might sound. Secondly, the chapter criticizes these ways of sounding dark urban landscapes in fiction, by analyzing a set of recordings and interviews that were made in dark urban settings. They show how a dense understanding of dark soundscapes contributes to widening one of urban atmospheres as synesthetic processes. In conclusion, this chapter contributes to showing that visual and sonic dark landscapes share more than visual and sonic landscapes in light, as they both built on co-extensive temporal and pragmatic processes. The interest in the question of darkness contributes to extending research on space and places by opening it to the theme of cosmic rhythms and their effects on the social world. Many of the social science works on night and darkness have shown how night, as a particular time of social activities, and darkness, as a specific quality of the ordinary luminous environment, configure specific ordinary and professional practices and policies (Fiori, 2000; Dunn, 2019; Ebbensgaard, 2019a; Gwiazdzinski, 2019); concern different groups (Wilkinson and Wilkinson, 2018); and refer to specific representations, values and imaginations (Koslofsky, 2011; Edensor, 2017a). In this sense, these works show that considering space and places in a situation of darkness does not amount to setting up a negative mirror of the situation of light, as does the “day for night” – or “American night” in French (a filmmaking process to make sequences filmed in daylight appear as if they are shot at night by the use of a material, or post-processed color, mostly blue filter). In doing so, through their interest in understanding the relationships that articulate place and darkness, these works unfold the lived worlds to highlight a blind zone of most urban research, as well as research on place which, without saying, is research applied to clarity. And these studies show the importance of understanding the reconstruction of a standardized universe based on clarity, the richness of alternative experiences and the diversification of the sensory world it proposes. Moreover, among the small existing body of work on darkness, most of these insist on the sense of sight, as dark is primarily a seeable quality that comes as necessarily related to light. Nevertheless, in which ways does darkness play a role when it comes to consider other senses than sight? As an example, one can easily imagine the smell of fresh dew emanating from grass as a feeling that can be associated with dawn. Randomly picked out of multiple other situations, this example illustrates how cosmic rhythms configure not only a visible luminous environment but also a complete set of sensory phenomena, imaginaries and uses, the understanding of which completes the understanding of the relationship between place and society. In this chapter, I will focus on the sonic apprehension of place and examine which representations and experiences go along darkness from an auditory point of view.