JACOB KIRKEGAARD

Labyrinthitis

Labyrinthitis works with otoacoustic emissions generated by the artist’s ears to produce otoacoustic emissions in the ears of the listeners.

Commissioned by and first performed at the Medical Museion, Copenhagen, Denmark. 16 speakers were installed on metal rods of varying lengths to create a 3-dimensional ascending spiral hanging from the dome ceiling of its former operating theatre.

Released on CD (Touch, 2008).

THE ACT OF ACTIVE HEARING:
JACOB KIRKEGAARD'S LABYRINTHITIS

By Douglas Kahn, August 2014. Published in Jacob Kirkegaard's book Earside Out (MOCA, Denmark, 2015)

Jacob Kirkegaard has, in Labyrinthitis, composed a unique work of art that directly incorporates active hearing. Kirkegaard is sitting in a room, unlike the one you are in now. It is a soundproof booth, a specialized scientific room in which he sits, tiny speakers and microphones in his ears, chambers within chambers. The speakers are sending tones into his inner ears that create tones in response, tones that are generated by the ear itself. Two tones are sent in and another tone, a third tone, or other tones, immediately come back. The pitches vary the responses vary. These are not psychoacoustic effects; they are actual sounds produced in the cochlea. These ear sounds are picked up by the microphones, amplified and recorded.

Kirkegaard then takes the recordings of these pitches into performance. He performs the sounds of his ears, and nothing but the sounds of his ears, to evoke similar tones in the ears of the audience. He also uses his ear sounds to precisely play off the sounds produced in their ears. The audience hears him hearing and hear themselves hearing; they then hear their hearing interacting with his hearing, and so forth, spiraling on. In this elegant way, Kirkegaard has countered Duchamp’s dictum, “One can look at seeing, one can’t hear hearing.”

The sensitivity of hearing is remarkable: the movement of the eardrum one hundred times smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom can be sensed. The eardrum passes this atomic breath onto the tiny bones of the ossicles, evolutionary gifts from a reptile's jaw, with the stapes (stirrup), the tiniest bone in the human body, passing the movement to the cochlea, an organ shaped like a seashell still containing the sea. As the fluid in the cochlea moves, hairs sway like seaweed and it is this last movement, not the vibrations in the air known as sound, that excite nerve signals through the nerves to the brain.

But this is a picture of hearing as a passive rather than active process, traveling in one direction from the outside in, from the air through flesh and bone to the sea. Active hearing occurs when sounds physically rebound in the ear and when the ear becomes a source of sounds in its own right. The ear emits sound. Most sounds are slight but a large one, the size of a hydrogen atom, can register at whisper volume (34 decibels). It is as though seaweed moving by itself created ripples in the water, as though Jean Piaget’s kids were right by saying that the movement of trees caused the wind. Active hearing is an allegory not merely for active listening, a concentration and direction of attention, but also for a larger interrelation of human subjectivity in multiple fields of the world.

Knowledge of active hearing developed due to an increased understanding of the physics of the inner ear that eventually lead to the discovery of the peculiar function of outer hair cells of the cochlea. They are motile cells that change shape, grow larger or small, in response to electrical stimulation from the nervous system in a process of "cochlear amplification." If engineering metaphors were applied these cells would resemble a solenoid; a change in the current produces a mechanical motion, but they may also be what we share with trees, pressure cells that account for why a giant sequoia does not collapse under its own weight. It has been stated that these cells beating back upon the cochlea are the only plant cells in the human body, thus we have hydrogen atoms, reptile jawbones, seashells and trees in our head.

To sound coming from the outside, they respond with a tiny amount of sound of their own. These sounds are called otoacoustic emissions (OAE, oto meaning ear) and are thought to play a part in ‘cochlear amplification’, a selective reinforcement of certain frequency characteristics. They dimensionally interact with the already complex movements in the water world of the cochlea to help physically image what we hear. When the cochlea spontaneously emits sounds in the absence of external sound, it is called spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAE). But before your first awkward attempts at auditory enunciation, you should know that no one else will hear without specialized equipment and the means of articulation are wanting. When OAEs are evoked by external tones, they are called distortion products (DPOAE) and can be heard. Labyrinthitis consists of DPOAEs. They are what Kirkegaard and those listening to him hear.

Jacob Kirkegaard sitting in a sound proof both listening to the sounds of his body leads, of course, to the image of John Cage sitting in an anechoic chamber hearing the sounds of his body. As the story goes, Cage heard a low sound and a high sound. The engineer told him it was the sound of his blood in circulation and the sound of his nervous system in operation. This indelible legend was based upon an educated guess. Others have thought that the high register Cage heard was a touch of tinnitus, whereas the composer James Tenney told me in conversation he thought that Cage might have heard SOAEs.

It is impossible to go back and seat Cage into a scientific space with fewer variables and better equipment to stick in his ears. Yet it is clear that he found the irrepressible sounds of his body very significant. Their very existence legitimized his counter-intuitive notion of silence as the absence of the absence of sound. In fact, he listened to these scientifically ^legitimized sounds as he would listen to no other sound, by letting his mind intercede: he asks himself, “what is that low sound; what is that high sound?” In other circumstances he strove to hear “a sound in itself.” For numerous reasons, there is no such thing as a sound in itself, no such things as sounds in themselves, especially given the biophysical basis of active hearing. What one hears is the nervous system and physiology reaching out to sound with their own sounds. The unity of "a sound" is a construct against which active hearing clears a discursive pathway to better hear from the inside out.

Kirkegaard and Cage have not been the only people listening to their bodies talk in clinical circumstances. In the early 19th Century, René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec, the maker of the stethoscope, became ill and tried to train the instrument he devised for listening to bodies of others, the stethoscope, onto himself. He was frustrated—the stiffness of the instrument prevented him from contorting to hear himself and he would not trust the reports of others—until he realized that he could hear his insides himself, his heartbeats and the sonic signatures of a whole set of digestive issues.

William Burroughs conducted crude “Throat Microphone Experiments” hoping to hear subvocal speech being the first to report on the fresh ruminations of his unconscious. He also imagined a sound test of the body in his cut-up novel “The Ticket that Exploded” where “small microphones were attached to the two sides of his body and the sounds recorded on two tape recorders – He heard the beating of his heart, the gurgle of shifting secretions and food, the rattle of breath and scratches of throat gristle – crystal bubbles in the sinus chambers magnified from the recorders – The attendant ran the tape from one recorder onto the other to produce the sound of feedback between the two body halves – a rhythmic twang – soft hammer of heartbeats pounding along the divide line of his body…”

Alvin Lucier listened to the transduced electromagnetic activity of his brainwaves in his Music for Solo Performer around the same time James Tenney had unrealized plans in Metabolic Music to listen to not only brainwaves but every sound and signal in his body, generalizing it to a "universal transducer." Many others would follow, but it was Maryanne Amacher who comes closest to Kirkegaard's enterprise when in the late-1970s she began to focus upon the stray "ear tone responses" that the spatial fields of her music were producing, sounds she would later understand to be OAEs.

Kirkegaard differs significantly from Amacher: instead of OAEs evoked in the ears of the audience by music in the space, he uses his own to evoke those among others. OAEs beget OAEs. Everything one hears in Labyrinthitis are OAEs. The entire space is filled with hearing. The ears of the audience become instruments for performing the piece; a sing-along of sorts. They hear, contra Duchamp, that one can hear hearing, their own hearing, in an involution, a folding in upon hearing with performance, by hearing the sounds of Kirkegaard's hearing. Hearing hearing hearing in a spiraling that itself emulates the seashell shape of the cochlea. It is simultaneously a conceptual project that shows that conceptualism can be cochlear, and a corporeal project where the insides of bodies an entire space is transformed, saturated with the sounds hearing in a collective form of auditory intimacy.

The ear sounds we hear in Labyrinthitis are high pitched, on the upper register of the piano keyboard, which the great 19th Century physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz imagined snaking submerged up the coil of the cochlea. They rise above guttural timbre of the throat and the brooding noises of the gut, and thus lack the timbre that once could have associated them with modernist notions of musical noise. OAEs, in fact, are more akin to the anti-noise of sine waves, the aperiodic waveforms of modernist noise versus the periodic waveforms of musical tone. They are musical tones pitched at a sustained pitch, a quintessential violin, the first chair of the music that the avant-garde sought to drown out the noise of percussion and the outside world.

Hearing has been imagined in the past as a percussive affair: the sounds of the outside world beating on a tympanum, an eardrum, maybe using the brushes. Only when the vibrations make their way through the bones of the middle ear to the hairs in the cochlea and open up ion channels do they transform from mechanical motion into the electro-chemical impulses sensible to the brain. This change of one energy state to another is called transduction. The only way to manage a return of sound in a passive model is to delay the route through the mouth, gestures, actions, performances, etc. Active hearing has it heading straight out the ear.

The provocation of Kirkegaard’s Labyrinthitis is to show that two-way traffic happens in the ear, at the point that transduction begins. This is what the astrophysicist Thomas Gold first proposed in his 1948 biophysics paper describing OAEs as “a feedback system consisting of a mechanical-to-electrical transduction process coupled to an electrical-to-mechanical transduction process.” The physiological fact of transductive reversal in active hearing reroutes relationships among technology, nature and the body. For Gold, such exchange fit well into a larger cosmos, for he was the person to name the magnetosphere and identify the source of the sound of pulsars. The sounds that our ears make are part of this energetic cosmos.

The tiny microphones and speakers in Kirkegaard’s ears, with sounds and electronic signals going both directions, are not separated by a gulf of nature and technology, but are instead in discursive and actual circuit with motions, energies, forces, impulses and radiations. This has been a concern of Kirkegaard in many of his other works. In Labyrinthitis, sounds interact both inside and outside the confines of individual experience, as hearing is introduced into the tranductive flows of the world. Here what is heard not only resonates with Helmholtz's piano but folds within a world of hydrogen, reptilian jaws, seashells and trees, and returns to it a performance of sound.

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Labyrinthitis

THE ACT OF ACTIVE HEARING: JACOB KIRKEGAARD'S LABYRINTHITIS

THE ACT OF ACTIVE HEARING:
JACOB KIRKEGAARD'S LABYRINTHITIS