We wouldn't be wet

some thoughts on counterfactual sound

I’ve recently started regularly releasing a sound composition I’m calling the counterfactual mixtapes (the second one is now available here). These mixtapes have two roles; primarily they are a sketchbook, a place for collages of sound experiments, field recording diaries and compositions in progress. They are also a way to begin investigating an idea I’m really interested in - the sonic counterfactual (hence the name). So I thought it wise to begin explaining the idea, or at least how I’m currently thinking about it.

In the project Future Soundings (a collaboration with theatre company Uninvited Guests) I’ve been exploring the role of sound in futures studies, primarily as a tool to help scaffold peoples’ imaginations, using it to materialise possible, preferred or even implausible futures. In doing background research and analysis of these projects I came across the term counterfactual (see the bottom of this piece for some specific references and inspirations).

If you haven’t heard of counterfactual before, I’ll try to provide a simple explanation (with apologies to all the philosophers of logic out there). A counterfactual statement relates to the ‘what if?’, the ‘what could have been’. For example ‘if we’d brought an umbrella with us, we wouldn’t be wet’. So one way to think about counterfactual statements is that by contradicting one world they open up another possible world, one where things could have been different.

The idea has been commonplace in literary theory and other more philosophical treatises (see David Lewis’s Counterfactuals if you want to delve deep in the logic, maths and possible worlds theories). It feels ok to suggest that when we read about another possible world we can imagine it existing, but can we actually go there and experience it? I’m wondering what happens when we hear these other worlds?

Something I find interesting is that when we listen to a sound in a room it’s still a sound (there are a whole set of ontological debates here around recording/medium etc but stick with me for a moment). Even if it is a recording being played back, what we’re hearing is an actual sound in the here and now. It might just be a recording of a bird, but there is really a sound wave in the room. It is travelling to you and being intercepted by your body in the same way as if there was a sound wave from a bird singing in the room. We may interpret it as a recording of a bird, but sometimes that interpretation might be more blurry or less certain. When we talk or read about a possible world it can seem to remain autonomous from us, but Salome Voegelin points out that when listening to sound artworks we are changing our actual soundscape, they “make audible ideas of the invisible” (Sonic Possible Worlds, p.51).

How does this relate to the future and our imagination of it. Well the what if of a counterfactual doesn’t just have to be about a situation we find ourselves in, it could be about one we are heading towards… if there’s a question of it never raining again, what will we be using umbrellas for?

In Future Soundings, the counterfactual soundscape is created based on text written by a group of participants describing how they imagine the future of a specific place. From their written descriptions I create an immersive soundscape that they all listen to together. In that moment I like to think that their imagined future is materialising in the room, the sound waves creating a visceral and tangible experience of one possible future (there’s many other complexities in this project that I will explore in future writing).

So let us bring multiple sounds together, entwined in a way they haven’t before to create an imagined situation, a possible future. The sound of children playing on a carless M25 motorway, the sound of a farmers market in the echoing halls of a closed down bank…. the sound of gunfire in a shopping centre… preferred futures? Plausible, possible, improbable? This is the sonic counterfactual, and when we listen to it we are within it. I think that the often inherent ambiguity of sound (e.g. what is making that sound?) might also help in this imaginative space. Hearing sounds that we easily identify combined with mysterious or unknown sonic textures lets the listener create their own counterfactual soundscape, the what if occurring at the point of audition.

The mixtapes I’m sharing at the moment are currently just my personal counterfactual what if, but I’m really interested in continuing to work with other people on theirs. I want to explore how we negotiate a collective possible world, one that we experience together through sound.

More on all this soon, but I’m very keen to hear thoughts if you have them….

References and pointers :

Salome Voegelin’s Sonic Possible Worlds beautifully connects David Lewis’s possible worlds theory into sound practices.

I was introduced to the idea of a counterfactual soundscape through the work of Rung-huei Liang, Bowen Kong, and Wenn-Chieh Tsai, from their academic paper “Confabulation Radio: Reflexive Speculation in Counterfactual Soundscape” (2019). This further proposes the idea of a counterpart self as the listener of these soundscapes, an idea I’ll be returning to,

In the paper Material Speculation: Actual Artifacts for Critical Inquiry (2015)- Ron Wakkary, William Odom, Sabrina Hauser, Garnet Hertz, and Henry Lin introduced me to the idea of counterfactual artefacts, and how a what-if might be materialised.