Jen Kutler - Sonified Physiological Indicators Of Empathy

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While the ultimate source of this record is the sounds of violence, the output often verges on the lush: voices, prepared piano and field recordings entangled and unfurled like clusters of wild flowers. Several stages of translation reside in between. The record was made by playing clips of violence (alternating with 10 seconds of silence) to a test subject, while measuring physiological factors such as electrodermal activity, breath and heart rate. This data was then turned into MIDI files and assigned to an array of “synthetic voices”, none of which directly evoke the jaggedness one most readily associates with the sound of violence. Instead, this violence exists as a sense of agitation – flickers of anxiety disrupting smoother movements, or dissonances emerging like smiles stretching into uncanny grimaces – but never approaches anything horrific – at least, overtly.

It is an exquisitely fraught listen. Allure and unease press into eachother. Flocks of pizzicato burst from gentle feedback tones; the quivers of audio time-stretching protrude like goosebumps upon arcs of melody; a choir of children wobbles between harmonic parallel and pulsing misalignment. It’s uncomfortable to never be exposed to the violent events at the source, and to be aware of their presence only through a discolouring of the record’s atmosphere, or the jolts of musical activity that suggest a heightened physiological response – a displacement that brings to mind the dispassionate, casual rendering of violence within everyday life through news reports or workplace conversation. Or is there something more optimistic here: an illustration of the fact that humans are wired to care, beholden to instincts that can’t help but express compassion in the face of violence? Kutler doesn’t unpack anything for me, and it feels right that I should simply be left to steep in this uncertainty.

A Closer Listen

Empathy has been in short supply over the past few years, shrinking from public discourse and political decisions.   An empathetic president is now facing a potentially cantankerous Congress as right-wingers continue to build their coalitions.  More people want empathy shown to them than want to show empathy to others, as evidenced by proliferations of violence ~ physical and verbal ~ against marginalized people ranging from Muslim immigrants to the LGBTQI community.  But we need not be that specific, as women and people of color still suffer around the world.  And who will hear?  And who will act?

Sound artist and experimentalist Jen Kutler wades into this mine field with a gem of reflective activity.  The artist “outfitted subjects with sensors reading electrodermal activity, breath and heart rate,” then exposed them to alternating aural snippets of silence and violence.  Sonified Physiological Indicators of Empathy examines these readings and combines them with field recordings and mulched music to create a study of human interaction ~ although the sum total sounds less than human, at times even robotic.  One might chalk this up to empathy’s enemy, apathy.  “feasible” is foreboding, with low tones intimating a threat, or worse, the excitement of witnessing a threat to others, whether a crime show, news report, or violence against peaceful protesters.

It’s a good thing that these sounds are accompanied by more peaceful videos, which temper the threat.  “Long Term Memory Loss” includes sudden rattles that might set off a person with post-traumatic stress syndrome, although the skeletal, kaleidoscopic trees suggest a different sort of hypnosis.  Just as a person become desensitized to violence, one may develop the opposite feeling when guided in benevolent manner.  In another context, an ambient track and video may take on sinister meaning, as in the deprogramming of A Clockwork Orange.  “short term memory loss” appears more like a swirling array of scans, data waiting to be interpreted, insoluble questions without answers.  “borders” wears its heart on its sleeve; reading the title, it’s impossible not to think of Trump’s wall and the Muslim ban (now halted), or Brexit (still unfolding), but the images and sounds are fluid.  The eyes see porous, morphing patterns of liquid; the ears hear waves, implying both border and endless sea.

Without images, it’s hard to know what to make of “fairness,” a Rorschach test of sound.  Are these voices crying out in pain, begging for mercy, or forming a choir of empathy?  The closing track, “a piece for amplified children,” makes the choral connection even more apparent, adding the soft sounds of birds and water.  Which begs the question, “Does this album sound like empathy?”  To these ears, it sounds more like pain, the final array of field recordings more a Band-Aid than a cure.  It’s obvious that Kutler wants everything to be all right, especially when it comes to children.  On the other hand, these layers of suffering may yet produce empathy: the initial experience, the secondary experience of the subject exposed to the sounds, and the tertiary experience of the listener thrice removed.  If such, Kutler may have achieved more than the clinical mirror of data may imply.  Strangely, the more of the same sort of suffering we witness, the more desensitized we get (for example, repetitions of the same footage).  But when exposed to a variety of personalized encounters (represented by the different tracks and timbres), our empathy may be sparked.  If listeners are affected even while distanced, hope may yet be feasible.  (Richard Allen)