Sonic Sensibilities: Idiocultural Sound in Youth-Produced Action Sports Videos

• In Event: Music, Movement, and Media: Tracing (Inter)Active Sounds and Sonic Interaction Across Diverse Learning Ecologies

Abstract

Action sports—like skateboarding and surfing—offer a particularly rich area to study the sensual, sonic, nature of digital media production. Surfers, for instance, have historically described the feeling of being “stoked, “or of having an “intense awareness of the moment,” (Stranger, 1999, p. 269). If one is stoked, Evers writes, “they experience a fully embodied feeling of satisfaction, joy, and pride. You will tingle from your head to your toes” (p. 894). Stoke, then, is an ongoing “felt state” that “varies according to intensity and duration” (p. 894).
As Anderson (2009) argues, however, the feeling of being “stoked” cannot be represented, although many athletes (and artists) endeavor to communicate that feeling: in the line-up before a wave rolls in, at the beach, in magazines, films, and advertising. This “surf-sense,” as Anderson notes, demands more than words, or text, to communicate. McGinty, for example, states:

I don’t need paper and ink, I need 24-karat gold monster-cable speaker wire with one end plugged into Backdoor Pipeline [a famous surf spot] and the other soldered into your adrenal gland. I need elongated vowel sounds and exaggerated hand movements. Can you feel it? Did it work? Do you have any idea what surfing is really like? (cited in Warshaw, 2004, p. XX)

Through digital media, atmospheres are “delivered” to various interfaces—including television and mobile devices—transforming as they are “reduced to fit sound speaker and screen” (Massumi, 2002, p. 85). In doing so, atmospheres “fold” across media; they are “piggybacked” across settings and experienced by others across space-time (Massumi, 2002, p. 84). Media, then, have the potential to “deliver open-ended and indeterminate sensations, movements, affects, thoughts, actions, and interactions” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 122).
How do digital media artists, including videographers and photographers, endeavor to represent the unrepresentable? How do they try to make viewers feel what it’s like to be in a moment? To address these questions, we adopt “visceral sonic mapping” (Duffy, Waitt & Harada, 2016) to analyze over 80 youth-produced action sports videos within and beyond skateparks. This method shifts a focus on the analysis of sound from “meaning,” writ large, to a focus on how sounds “pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams and social worldings of all kind” (Stewart, 2007, p. 6). This analysis evinces, what we refer to as, the sonic sensibilities of digital media artists. Sonic sensibilities are critical as artists attune themselves to particular sounds, in the moment, to give shape, and feeling, to their final product, with the recognition that it will be experienced by others through various media platforms. These sonic sensibilities, we argue, are (idio)culturally-dependent, recognizable to others in the (idio)culture and therefore capable of atmospheric (re)production through digital media.

Author

• Ty Hollett, Penn State University