Riccardo Giacconi
Second Person Audio.
Genres, devices and stories to listen to with the body
2022

Italian version published on Il Tascabile.

In the article “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” (1991), Linda Williams defines as body genres the film genres that are based on stimulating certain physical reactions in the bodies of spectators. These are fear (horror), sexual arousal (pornography), and tears (melodrama). All three genres share “an apparent lack of proper aesthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion. We feel manipulated” by them. The bodies of whoever watches these films are involved in an “involuntary mimicry” of the body on the screen.

During a talk at the 2016 Third Coast Conference, radio producer Eleanor McDowall inquired about what would the equivalent of body genres be in audio storytelling (radio, podcast, and other forms of audio narratives). What are those sound works that engage the bodies of their listeners, not by merely talking about bodily reactions, but by actually provoking them?

Alongside the trio of reactions to body genres mentioned above by Linda Williams, one could add the urge to dance, which McDowall said she was inspired by when she produced A Dancer Dies Twice, an audio documentary about the relationship between dance and aging, “between identity and physicality”, about the “separation of your internal self and its representation outside” . The documentary includes a long sequence in which the voices of various dancers are edited into the beats of fast-paced music, which abruptly ends with the sound of a rip, when one of the protagonists talks about twisting her knee ligaments during a performance. “I wanted the experience of listening to this to be something that feels very physical”, explained McDowall .

A journey through audio pieces that act on one’s body while overcoming the “coded articulations of language” might start from the relationship between audio storytelling and choreography. Among the examples mentioned by McDowall is the audio piece by choreographer Hofesh Shechter created in 2011 for Everyday Moments, a podcast series commissioned by The Guardian. Directly addressing listeners, Shechter’s voice describes very precisely a sequence of bodily feelings, connected to the movements we are invited to perform – or imagine:


Think about your body. Don’t think about me. Think about your body. Feel your body being very very light, being empty. Like an empty plastic bag. It starts moving, because it’s so light and empty. Every little movement of air in the room affects your body because it’s so light and empty, like an empty plastic bag. It’s rattling, it starts to move around, it floats.


Choreographer Paola Bianchi employs a similar approach in her “project of verbal dance” NoBody (2015). In this case, however, the listening subject is invited to take the audience’s position. Bianchi’s voice describes meticulously every movement performed by a female body on stage, including costumes, props, and stage lighting:


The figure stops in front of us. Their heels are close, their toes are slightly outwards. They look at us. Their right arm opens laterally, following a low diagonal, showing the palm of their hand. Their right hand shows the number three with their closed fist, stretching their thumb, index finger, and middle finger. Their neck is tense, as are their shoulders and chest. They start to come forward towards the proscenium, walking on tiptoe. It is as if they were walking on a rope hanging in the air.


Bianchi defines this audio piece as a “bodiless choreography in search for listening bodies”. The dance solo takes place only in the listener’s imagination, concretely evoked through the rhythm and descriptive precision of a voice. As the narration progresses, ‘your’ position in the audience is increasingly called upon, and the choreography starts to explore the relationship between a moving body and an observing body (as in the famous introduction to Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, which outlines a degree zero of the act of theatre ).

Ghost tapes

Moving beyond the field of audio storytelling, one can mention at least three listening experiences based on physical reactions comparable to body genres. On the one hand are ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) sounds, which produce a feeling of relaxation, at times accompanied by tickling sensations on the scalp, the neck, and the spine.

On the other hand is a sound device called “Mosquito” that, according to the company producing it, “works by exploiting a medical condition called presbycusis”, based on the fact that, as we age, “our ability to hear higher frequency sounds is reduced.” The Mosquito emits a tone that ranges from 16 to 18.5 kilohertz, which is extremely annoying for adolescents, but generally imperceptible by adults. This device is sold to be installed in public spaces where gatherings of adolescents should be avoided. Spanish artist Santiago Sierra used a very similar sound in his installation Los Adultos (2007), a room with speakers where the visitors “would behave depending on what they could or couldn’t hear”.

A third, more narrative example regards one of the very reactions mentioned by Williams: fear. It is not an artwork, but a psychological warfare technique used from 1969 to 1970 by the US army in Vietnam: the so-called “Operation Wandering Soul” . It consists of a series of audio recordings conceived to exploit the Vietnamese belief that bodies not buried in their homeland are bound to turn into spirits and wander aimlessly for eternity. By using the voices of allied soldiers alongside sound effects, the Americans created a sort of horror radio play, in which the ghosts of Viet Cong who had died in the battle spoke again. These ‘ghost tapes’ were then broadcast at high volume in the middle of the night, often using speakers mounted on helicopters flying over enemy territory. The intention was that the North Vietnamese soldiers, in fear, would abandon arms. In some cases, the Viet Cong realised the trick and started shooting at the helicopters. In other cases, however, the tapes were almost too effective, so much so that they terrified allied troops and civilians as well.

Existential Overlap

Over precisely the same years, Bruce Nauman created Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968), an artwork that only exists as sound. It is a recorded audio track in which the artist incessantly repeats the title sentence, only varying intonation and timbre. The piece is usually installed in an empty room and seems to be addressing the entering audience directly, ordering them to leave. Through stereophony, Nauman’s voice oscillates from one side to the other of the exhibition room, making the body of whoever experiences it inescapably engaged in it.

Janet Cardiff’s audio walks (produced since 1991, often in collaboration with George Bures Miller) are a series of pieces conceived to be listened to with headphones, in specific places. Sounds and voices lead the listeners during a walk, providing indications about the path to be followed, and, at the same time, weaving a narrative line that interacts with visual, tactile and olfactory stimuli as perceived by the walking bodies. In Villa Medici Walk (1998), for instance, the track is designed to be experienced during a walk through Rome, leading from a grove of orange trees to an underground cellar full of the heads and arms of broken statues:


I want you to walk with me. I need to show you something. Try to walk with the sound of my footsteps so that we can stay together. Go through the doorway in the wall to the right, past the iron gate, then go to the left.

[sound of car]

It’s a great view of the Villa, the gardens, the statues of the defeated Barbarians. The fountains.

[sound of water starts. sound changes to fire crackling, bombs, helicopter]

Experiment no 1. Cut 100 snowflakes out of paper. Go to the top of the tower and throw them off, one at a time. […] Let’s walk again. Go towards the stone steps.


Whereas in Nauman’s piece a body is addressed within a closed space, Cardiff’s audio walks invite you to move, to be engaged in an exploratory way. By using binaural recording techniques (i.e. conceived to reproduce, through headphones, an immersive 3D acoustic perception), the Canadian artist evokes an immersive environment that is parallel to and communicating with the real one.

Both Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room and Villa Medici Walk use the second person singular, directly addressing the listening subject. Narratologist Monika Fludernik defines second-person narration as a “narrative whose (main) protagonist is referred to by means of an address pronoun (usually you)” . In literature, the narrating you can thus produce an “existential overlap” , since it can refer to the protagonist of the story, to a narratee, or to the actual reader. A fluidity of roles ensues, through which, according to Fludernik, “the current reader finds herself addressed but cannot immediately delimit the reference to one specific narrative level” . However, this “initial distancing effect – ‘Is this me, the reader? Or is this a character?’ – can develop into an increased empathy effect” , letting us “step into the you protagonist’s mind” .

Second-person narration is quite unusual: there are only a few occasions in life when someone recounts someone else’s past experiences to them. Fludernik mentions two cases:
“eliciting an amnesiac’s recollection of their past self” , and “the ‘courthouse you’ – the rendering of the defendant’s (or witness’s) actions and thoughts in the reconstructive narration addressed to the defendant/witness in the witness box with the aim of eliciting a confession”.

Hypnotic Show

Rarely used in audio storytelling (except for self-help and meditation guides, or tracks for foreign language training), the narrating you may bring to mind the verbal techniques of hypnotic induction, especially when using the present tense. The connection between radio and suggestion is longstanding: many early radio plays questioned the role and position of listeners, who would be brought to believe, for example, that they were capturing a radio signal coming from a ship in the middle of the sea (Maremoto, 1924), telephone interference (Sorry, Wrong Number, 1943), or that they were witnessing an extraordinary change of programme (The War of the Worlds, 1938).

In its early days, radio was often considered an hypnotic device. Rodolfo Sacchettini defines the Italian radio program I 4 moschettieri (1934-1937) as “a veritable mass phenomenon, on the verge between magic and hypnosis” ; and also Hitler’s very voice, on the radio, was often defined as hypnotic . In 1964 Marshall McLuhan, after listing radio among the “hot media” (that is, the ones that concentrate on one sensory channel and involve little user participation) stated that “the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community”. Moreover, a hypnotic suggestion technique (RHIC – Radio Hypnotic Intracerebral Control) was allegedly developed by the CIA in the 1960s, one that could be triggered at will by radio broadcasting.

A different form of distance hypnosis has been devised by US psychologist Lloyd Glauberman, who, by means of music tapes, CDs and mp3s, uses his voice to influence the listener’s body and mind. Among the various hypnosis and meditation techniques based on audio recordings, this has a particular feature. It is called HPP (Hypno-Peripheral Processing) and is designed to be experienced through headphones: a voice tells two parallel stories at the same time, one for each ear. At first listening is confusing, because one’s mind struggles to follow both channels. And yet, according to Glauberman, the goal is precisely to induce one’s conscience to let go, for it to access a state in which it will seize upon a sort of secret message concealed between the two parallel audio tracks (just like in autosteoreograms, those seemingly abstract images which, when crossing the eyes in a certain way, lead the observer to perceive a 3D shape).

The link between art and hypnosis has been widely explored by Marcos Lutyens – artist, hypnotist and second-person narrator. One of his most famous art projects only exists in the mind of the audience. It is called Hypnotic Show and is led in collaboration with curator Raimundas Malašauskas. It includes a series of exhibitions – of continuously changing scale and nature, featuring works by several artists – that exist only in mind of the audience by means of hypnosis sessions. The most famous chapter of the project took place at Kassel Documenta in the summer of 2012, when Lutyens led 340 such sessions. Malašauskas defined Hypnotic Show as a “temporary social structure of engaging into creative cognitive acts through shared practices of art and hypnosis”.

Another project by Marcos Lutyens is the Inductive Audio Museum, a set of sound works to be experienced with headphones, “invit[ing] the visitor’s mind to expand beyond its normal boundaries […] Thus, the artwork is formed in the mind rather than physically, in the gallery space”. Lutyens’s audio inductions directly address the bodies of listener-visitors, evoking quite detailed sensory experiences:


Whenever you are ready now we are going to slowly begin the journey upwards and as we begin to ascend I’d like your body to begin to feel heavier and heavier, just allowing yourself to sink more and more and deeper and deeper into this very comfortable and almost completely familiar armchair. […] I’d like you now to pay attention to your hands as they are resting there, so heavy and so relaxed and as you focus all your attention now on your hands, and just how incredibly heavy they are.

Embodiment

As opposed to the escapist inclination of formats such as self-help tapes or guided meditation, some recent sound pieces leverage second-person narration to give shape to social as well as political commentary, directly acting on the listening body and stimulating the body genres' catalogue of reactions.

An example is Journey, an audio work produced in 2016 by Jungala Radio, a community radio of the Calais refugee camp. Jamil (not his real name) talks about losing his parents in an attack, fleeing Afghanistan with his family and seeing one of his daughters die during the sea-crossing. The account is told with extreme simplicity, but instead of a narrating I, Jamil uses you. Journey reveals the full potential of second-person storytelling, setting ‘you’ at the centre of an excruciating experience, and asking, from the very start:


Imagine you were in my shoes. How would you feel? You are 29 years old with a wife, two children and a job. You have enough money and can afford a few nice things. You live in a small house in the city. Suddenly the political situation in your country changes and a few months later soldiers are gathered in front of your house and in front of your neighbour’s house. They say that if you don’t fight for them, they will shoot you. Your neighbour refuses. One shot, that’s it.


Another format that directly addresses its audience using the second person singular is the gamebook, which invites the reader to make choices between different narrative paths, thus influencing the development of the plot. The narrating you places the reader in the position of the protagonist, at the heart of action. Writer Carmen Maria Machado, in her memoir In the Dream House, traces back her experience of an abusive domestic relationship, and in doing so resorts to a number of literary genres. One of the chapters takes the form of a gamebook, and in 2020 it was included in an episode of the celebrated US radio programme This American Life. This radio adaptation is entitled You Can’t Go Your Own Way and removes the interactive dynamics of the choice between different plots. The second-person narration positions the listening subject in the centre of a situation of domestic abuse, before a series of options over which, however, they have no control:


Page 1, you wake up, and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes, and clothes, and dishes. You think to yourself, this is the kind of morning you could get used to.
When you turn over, she is staring at you. The luminous innocence of the light curdles in your stomach. You don't remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly.
“You were moving all night”, she says. “Your arms and elbows touched me. You kept me awake”. If you apologize profusely, go to page 2. If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to page 3. If you tell her to calm down, go to page 5.


At the end of her essay on moving-image body genres, Linda Williams states that “we may be wrong in our assumption that the bodies of spectators simply reproduce the sensations exhibited by bodies on the screen” . The process is significantly more complex, and “identification is neither fixed nor entirely passive”.

Monika Fludernik observes that second-person fiction has the “subversive potential for creating an unsettling effect – that of involving the actual reader of fiction, not only in the tale, but additionally in the world of fiction itself”. This effect, Fludernik adds, “can be put to very strategic political use [...] increasing potential empathy values” and forcing (external) readers to an inner awareness of the situation, a point of view they would not have otherwise. Journey and You Can’t Go Your Own Way show that this “subversive potential” can also be detected in non-fiction sound pieces.

One last example of how the ‘audio second person’ can attain political significance is the autobiographical work How to Remember by Axel Kacoutié , made for the programme Short Cuts on BBC Radio 4 and awarded Best Documentary at the 2020 edition of the prestigious Third Coast International Audio Festival. Kacoutié describes it as “an attempt to reconcile and accept [...] all the parts of me that I’ve either wrongly internalised or intuitively known to be true.”


You don’t know what it means to be Black because you don’t know what it means to be one thing. Who is when you know you are a brother and a son, a lover and a friend. Sometimes you say you’re Ivorian. And other times you say “Je suis Ivoirien”, which means you feel more French than British, until you go to France where your French isn’t French enough. When you come back, you feel more British than Ivorian, until you’re offered tea. Or learn something about this country that puts you on the outside again.


Second-person storytelling is used here as a sort of cathartic method, tracing back the conflict between “the historical, racial, familial and personal elements” that informed the identity of the narrator/narratee. The use of sound design and archival material helps give concreteness and spatiality to past experiences, evoking places, emotions, and sensations, as well as inviting the listeners to dive into – to embody – the story.