Life Unseen

Life Unseen is a radiophonic tape composition.

Over its seventy-minute duration, the work explores the subject of blindness from a variety of reference points. First of all, there is a tapestry of personal perspectives pulled together from interviews made in Vancouver, Canada during April of 1996: men and women of various ages with different experiences of blindness. Secondly, there is the leading voice of the writer-actress Alex Bulmer from Toronto, Canada who describes her gradual progression over ten years from being sighted to becoming legally blind. Finally, there is a mélange of styles and techniques blended from the recipe books of radio producers and electroacoustic composers by Darren Copeland: documentary commentary, storytelling, poetic monologue, acousmatic music, and soundscape composition.

The written commentary provides a scene by scene breakdown of Life Unseen. It also discusses two of the work's central issues: the absence of blind people from the production and discourse of acousmatic art; the interdisciplinary nature of Life Unseen and the fluid interplay between realism and artifice that the work engages in.

Life Unseen is divided into two parts that are in turn broken up into individual scenes. The term 'scene' is used here in place of the term movement to denote the fact that the musical composition is embedded inside a dramatic framework. Also, it is used because the words of the text are themselves embedded in a sonic environment, which transforms according to developments that are either musical, physical (i.e., natural to an environmental sound recording), or dramaturgical. Thus, each scene can develop according to musical and dramatic choices, as well as environmental actualities contained in the soundscape recordings that lie at its acoustic foundation.

The central issue in Part One is the importance of favouring vision over other forms of sensory input. Is losing vision the only means to exploring many uncharted realms of the senses? Conversely, is the loss of vision a loss of personal freedom? Perhaps it is a loss that should be mourned. On the other hand, it might be a bridge to a completely different path of discovery.

The problem of defining 'legal' blindness is presented right at the outset, as vision loss can take on many more forms than the common lay person would imagine. The scene also moves inside the psychological experience of blindness by examining how blindness upends basic concepts and functions easily taken for granted, such as the perception of time and space or the simple tasks of eating, walking, dreaming, and socializing.

In this scene, the argument that blind people are at a disadvantage when it comes to orienting themselves around an environment is outlined and challenged.

Essentially, this scene does exactly what the title says. It reverses the sensory hierarchy prevalent in western society, and highlights the many intricacies of detail available to the other senses, particularly the sense of hearing.

Elegy was written in memory of those experiences that are no longer accessible to Alex Bulmer after she had lost her vision. The many plays of light, shape, and nuance that the eyes once consumed are recollected and cherished.

This scene builds upon the premise of the third by focusing on the heightened listening of blind people. The ears like the eyes can reach out and collect the subtlest of clues about the people, things, and places that encircle the blind listener.

Part Two focuses on the social dimension of blind people's experiences. It investigates how their particular needs are thwarted and challenged by a society revolving around a visual focus. Life Unseen concludes with the observation that a person losing his or her sight is not taking on a disability, but rather, gaining a new social perspective.

Two threads run side by side in this scene. The first is a conversation about the feelings of vulnerability brought on by the use of low vision aids in the social environment. The second is Alex Bulmer's description of sitting down on a leather chair in a cafe, the process of which is tainted with difficulties as she attempts to conceal her blindness from the people around her.

In this scene we take a trip through a shopping mall and other public environments. Along the way we encounter the gulf that exists between sighted people's attitudes and blind people's needs.

Blind people must trust the people around them a great deal more than sighted people. However, instances do occur when this trust is let down by an insensitive or greedy sighted person. Two instances are related and dramatized that are based on riding in a cab.

Most people find loud environments anti-social. For blind people, noisy environments are utterly paralyzing and constitute a kind of absolute darkness. In quiet social environments, however, the blind person's perception of detail is far more sensitive than that of sighted people. In conversations, for instance, the blind person can pick up truths which speakers do not wish to disclose by tuning into voice qualities and general moods.

The final scene brings together all of the key soundscapes and sound events before returning to Alex Bulmer. She reflects first on her experiences in Toronto, where she struggles with a fast paced sighted lifestyle. Then she reviews the trip to Vancouver, and marvels at how the activities in a day can be planned to accommodate blind people. Her Vancouver experiences provide hope that the special attributes and needs of blind people can add up to forming the building blocks of a unique culture.

The blind community perceives details of life that sighted people can not easily access. In my experience, I find that seeing restrains the degree to which I can tune in my listening to the sounds of my common everyday environment. I never have to find a doorway by listening to the changes in footsteps as they disappear down the corridor. Nor do I have to pay attention to changes in acoustic reflections or air temperature as I pass from one corridor to the next. Therefore, my non-visual senses miss many subtle nuances of my environment, simply because my vision supplies me with everything that I need to know in order to travel safely down the corridor.

The aural orientation of blind people shows that there is more to sensitive listening than hunting for the fleeting traces of musicality existing in the sonic environment. Built inside the sounds of everyday life are many layers of human experience, and because of this, composers using soundscape recordings need to listen for more than just latent musicality.

To initiate such a listening process it is useful to ask questions about what is heard in a soundscape recording. How intelligible are voices in relationship to the effects of environmental masking and room reverberation? How would one in fact describe the room reverberation, and is it suitable for the purposes which the room may serve? What does the environment actually feel like? Such questions provide insight into the psychological and physical relationship between people and the environments around them. By listening to public environments with an aesthetic ear, one can attribute moods and feelings to the environments that one inhabits. These observations can in turn serve the purposes of composition and imbue the social dimension of environmental sounds with an understanding of their emotional impact.

It is also helpful to try visualizing the events taking place in a soundscape recording. For example, what languages are being spoken, and by people of what age, nationality, and gender? Are there any motor vehicles or any machinery being operated within earshot? Is the sound of footsteps audible and to what would you attribute their character? Such questioning could lead to the realization that a soundscape recording is a document of society in action. However, reaching this realization requires society to listen as much as it sees.

Unfortunately, acousmatic composers refuse to handle these documents of society as being something other than objects for musical construction. By doing this, they endorse the visual prejudice at work in society, and they allow cultural analysts to continue revisiting the sights of culture while ignoring the sounds. What is more unfortunate is that blind people (among other cultural minorities in the west) have inadvertently been excluded from participating in acousmatic music. This is remarkable because acousmatic music is an art-from that exists entirely in the aural domain from conception through to presentation, except for the visual biases designed into its software and mechanical interfaces. These biases can easily be overcome, however, since they are placed there somewhat arbitrarily by a corporate interest in mass appeal.

Blind people develop a special aural sensitivity by interacting with the environment and society primarily through their hearing and verbal communication. This is perhaps why many of them become fluent in musical practices where visual notation is not necessary, such as blues, jazz, folk, or rock'n'roll. In fact, virtually all of the blind persons interviewed in Life Unseen possessed either a musical talent or an avid interest in one of those genres. But none of them were familiar with acousmatic music, which, not surprisingly, stands as the norm for my encounters with blind people.

It is quite logical to assume that an art form that portrays or addresses contemporary society through recordings of environmental sounds, whether with one-second samples or continuous ambient backdrops, must involve the participation of people whose primary orientation is aural. Absence of the blind community from such activity places an acute limitation on whatever insight is gleaned from the work, since many sound technicians and artists will openly admit the extent to which visual attention reduces listening sensitivity. Just where and how far could this insight go if vision was removed from the equation altogether?

There is more to the soundscape than latent music. There is more to repetitions and patterns of sound events than mere rhythm. The eyes may tell a great deal, but the ears and the other senses are also filling up with many insightful details about people and society. In the black audio canvas stretched between a pair of loudspeakers, lies a side of life still largely unnoticed and unexplained. Life Unseen leads sighted listeners into this world in order for them to understand how blind people respond to the environment around them, and overcome the barriers presented by a visually centered society.

There is a cast of generous contributors to whom we owe our thanks.