Sound of the Year: 2010 – The Vuvuzela

In the June 29th entry to his blog, Afrika Aphukira, Malawian writer Steve Sharra provides interesting sociological insight into Africa's football culture, and more specifically, the regional relevance now afforded Ghana, given their triumphant performance at the 2010 World Cup.

But for me –a music theorist living on the edge of America– the most thought provoking part of the piece is when Sharra indicates that the sound rising up from Royal Bafokeng Stadium might actually be more than just the usual crowd applause. A victory cheer was certainly in order: Ghana's national soccer team defeated the US contingent only three days before Sharra published his article. But perhaps this noisy, euphoric sound, he suggests, also represents a fanfare for a new African century.

Shara writes:

The more compelling story worth telling about the global tournament in South Africa this year has two sides to it. First is the story of what Ghana’s triumph symbolizes, at the center of which symbolism is Africa’s past and future. This symbolism is embodied in the vuvuzela, the cheering trumpet. Riding on the success of Ghana is also the story of how the 2010 World Cup has thus far proved wrong most of its critics, detractors, pessimists and doubting Thomases. The vuvuzela, much like Ghana’s Black Stars, has beaten odds to become more than a cheering instrument. It has now attained the status of an African metaphor for the unacknowledged ways in which Africa determines particular discourses at the global level. There are three narratives intertwined here. First, Ghana is carrying the hopes of the continent, and the larger Pan-African world. Second, this tournament has been remarkable for the bigger presence of players of African descent in many of the teams, especially those from Europe and Latin America. Third, the phenomenon that has become the vuvuzela takes on a significance that elevates the symbolization of Ghana’s performance thus far, as well as the widespread presence of African influence in the ancestry of the players on the field."

Then Shara points us to the June 24th Mail & Guardian Online’s Thought Leader blog, where Sarah Britten quotes The Financial Times' Peter Aspden as saying (of the vuvuzela):

“It is a joyous, life-affirming sound, of a nation entranced in pride and celebration, and expressing it through its own culture.”

That is, however, an observation that actually falls short of Shara's premise, because suddenly we realize that the vuvuzela is no longer merely the sound of 'its own culture'. To be precise, the vuvuzela's caterwauling wail has achieved nothing less than transcended culture and even transcended soccer to become the sound that defines our times.

Of course, it might be that the vuvuzela was simply the loudest (or most annoying) sound of 2010. I understand that comment, but I still think it the most significant sound of 2010.

Beating out pop songs, jingles and a seemingly infinite ensemble of machine made voices: What other sound was bigger, brasher, more memorable or more memetic? And what other sonic branding mnemonic has ever proved more easily capable of representing all these things: 1) a major multinational sporting event, 2) the sport itself and 3) both the country and the continent that hosted said sport's biggest game in the last four years?

And that's why I nominate The Vuvuzela as The Sound of the Year.

Not to mention that what the vuvuzela has come to represent is not simply a single moment in sports history, but also a moment in our collective global history. And this moment sings out with a distinctive, jubilant and multinational voice.

Did you ever ask yourself if music was powerful enough to unite the world? Well, it is, provided one sings one's chorale (or blows a horn) around a football pitch.

I have thought often whether a narrative history of the world could be written from the perspective of one one era-defining sonic moment to the next. And as of this very moment, I'm absolutely certain that it could.

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To read The Vuvuzelization of world football: Ghana & the real story of SA2010 and other thought provoking pieces by Mr. Sharra, click the link.

Photo Credit: Image by Caldwella, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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HOW THE SOUND OF THE YEAR IS SELECTED:

The Critical Noise Sound of the Year goes to that sound source, event, entity, happening or concept which so effectively produces wide response and reaction, whether intentional or not, such that it stirs collective emotion, inspires discussion, incites action, or otherwise lends itself to cultural analysis and resonates across the globe.

Prior Sound of the Year winners include Auto-Tune (2009), The Housing Implosion (2008) and Mother Nature's Howl (2005)

VUVUZELAS AND V-TWIN ENGINES

In Luigi Russolo’s seminal work, THE ART OF NOISES –first published in 1913-– the Italian painter and Futurist proposed that: "For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the ‘Eroica’ or the ‘Pastoral’.”

In fact, “…We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure.’

Today, many still distinguish between sound and musical sound, but if film production and the tape recorder did not erase that distinction, the sampler certainly has.

As for Russolo, he wasn’t simply suggesting this would be an interesting pursuit, he thought it a necessary and inevitable musical evolution:

“…Futurist musicians must continually enlarge and enrich the field of sounds. This corresponds to a need in our sensibility. We note, in fact, in the composers of genius, a tendency towards the most complicated dissonances. As these move further and further away from pure sound, they almost achieve noise-sound. This need and this tendency cannot be satisfied except by the adding and the substitution of noises for sounds…”

Over the last century, our ears have indeed grown accustomed to the sound of the industrialized and now post industrial soundscape. That a sampled beat might be sourced from one machine, processed in another device and finally performed from yet another is not just no longer a novel idea, but in some genres, de rigueur.

But what Russolo did not foresee is that when we have at last subjugated noise –when we actually become masters of it; when we learn to enjoy it; dance to it, and even to sing along with it– that it no longer retains its shape as a continuously surprising cacophony, which is what he longed for. Nor could he predict that this so-called art of noises might perhaps reach it’s highest apex in the repetitive and musical looping of something we call hip hop.

But I think that he would be very pleased to know that noise-sound instruments, which he called ‘intonarumori’, would one day underscore the global zeitgeist. For evidence of that, tune one’s ears no further than to the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Because it was then and there that FIFA President Sepp Blatter noted that one ubiquitous intonarumori in particular, the vuvuzela, contributed much to the "…noise, excitement, dancing, shouting and enjoyment" of the event.

But could Russolo have possibly imagined how well the art and conquest of noises might lend itself to the art of sonic branding?

For today, not only have composers learned how to integrate noise into what we now might consider relatively conventional musical compositions, but they also routinely use an assortment of analog and digital intonarumori in the creation of varied sonic designs, whether for score, device application, venue installation or audio mark. Not to mention the now common use of conventional instruments employed in unconventional means, producing controlled noise for color or effect.

Amazingly, along the way, audiences have also simultaneously developed the ability to intuit non-verbal messaging from these noise-built audio constructions.

A roar of a Harley Davidson V-Twin engine, for instance, is not just the distinctive sound emitted from a particular motorcycle, but it also signals the drive, power and freedom felt and projected by the owner of the vehicle.

Our ears, it turns out, are capable of decoding multiple layers of semiotic and emotive meaning from a single sonic event, even from a single beat.

Consider that whatever its construction, a sonic logo is nothing less than a carrier for symbolic data. And not unlike a small work of origami created from a torn page of a scared artifact, once unfolded (and translated or decoded using common cultural assumptions), it will reveal a world of meaning within it. Similarly, no matter how fastidiously edited, a mere sliver of sampled pop music from our youth can transport each and everyone of us back through time and space.

Interestingly, no matter how much our current compositions resonate with Russolo’s noises, nor how accurate his vision of the future; and despite our synthesizers, samplers, or the zeitgeist and the vuvuzelas; neither the kalimba nor the violin has become obsolete. This I find a particularly profound topic for further consideration. Not to mention how the guitar itself has also performed a neat trick by evolving into a hybrid sound design tool, capable of serving as both traditional instrument and electronically processed noise-maker.

It is all, somehow, music to our ears.

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Photo Collage by Terry O'Gara