ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the cultivation, through extended fieldwork practices of sound recording in Okinawa Japan, of a sensory attunement to the differences between hearing and listening. It considers how this distinction may be explored through the multimodal form of a sound archive which may act in a multisensory register so as to describe elements of the sound environment of Okinawa. The “Okinawa island” archive is a new (2022) part of Alexander Street Press’s Ethnographic Sound Archive collection and the recordings are the result of interdisciplinary, collaborative research carried out across Okinawa between 2007 and 2019 by acoustician Kozo Hiramatsu, anthropologist Rupert Cox, sound artist Angus Carlyle, musicologist Junko Konishi, and more recently by bio-acoustician Nicholas Friedman. The curated selection of their recordings presents a particular type and arrangement of descriptions of environmental sound in Okinawa, organized thematically via the layered architecture of the archive in terms of locations, events, practices. The chapter makes a case for the sound archive as a layered form of sensory ethnography not only through its multimodality but also because the sound recordings which comprise the collection are rooted in an ethno-aesthetic attention to the language used by research subjects in Okinawa to talk about sound and listening, as well as the artistic genres, conventions, and conversations that are particular to Okinawa in representing the sound environment. The making of sound recordings that we discuss were guided by these contextual reference points. They allow us to examine not just what sounds were present in any environment to be recorded, but to explore first how perception works in the context of the field site and then look at how certain spaces may “speak” to allow us to listen to the sounds that remain in place.
