CNRS GDRI #1 Nantes 2014

The Sound of the Ambiance of Languages

The here presented audio visual experience is based on a proposal by Jean-Paul Thibaud and Daniel Siret, and developed by Aurore Bonnet and Valerio Signorelli, during the first seminar of the GDRI « Translating Ambiances » of the International Ambiances Network.

We asked nine members of the International Ambiances Network to read an extract of the poem Notes on the Melody of Things (Rainer Maria Rilke, paragraph XVI), in their own languages. The multimedia product, obtained by using audio and video devices, allowed us to render the individual and shared experiences of the participants by considering how the sound of their languages describes and influences the urban ambiances, and how the body language fits this situation of reading in public spaces. The final result is addressed to the research community working on the ambiances in the architectural and urban realm.

The product renders the originality of the experience in three parts aimed at highlighting the attention on the voices and the commitment of body languages of the participants that need to find the right moment to take their place in the various urban environments.

Polyphonies

A voice emerges from the curious and silent waiting, a voice that triggers a suspended state: someone dares to speak with restraint, until a combination of different idioms rises to declaim the sixteenth paragraph of Notes on the Melody of Things (Rainer Maria Rilke). Within this « metabolic context »* , words are indistinct but the rhythm and sounds of the nine languages create a clear sonic stratum, giving it thickness and density, highlighting its reliefs, and developing slowly a brief melody of the paragraph, the act of an « oral movement ». Afterwards, the second experience unravels the various sounds by suggesting the words of the poem for three times. Listening the inspiration of each languages, through the initiatory reflection of the text, we suddenly become Italian, French, Spanish, German, English, Danish, Portuguese, Greek, Arabic interpreters and readers.

Bodies melody

The sounds of the urban environment are superimposed on the video. A close-up camera frames a visage/face whose lips whisper the text. The head nods to a voice-over that gives some recommendations and for whom the gaze is attracted and moves away briefly. An ambulance siren, the hum of a helicopter taking off, the river flowing in the background. The close-up changes to a medium shot, from side to front. At the same time, during the set up of the scene, the camera captures the manners in which the participants find their place in the urban environment, and thus meeting the poem words, to perform into the Nantes’ broad melody.

« Whether it be the singing of a lamp or the voice of a storm, whether it be the breath of an evening or the groan of the ocean — whatever surrounds you, a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody. » Rainer Maria Rilke, Notes on the Melody of Things (XVI).

As described in Rilke’s text, the orality materialises itself through the bodily mediation, which gives to the voice its space among the melody of things. This is the most important part that we choose to highlight in our audio visual project. The exercise is difficult, the situation is dangerous: alone, surrounded, watched in the city which does not wait nor listen to us. It is necessary to expose ourselves. Everyone, in their presence, finds the way to ride out the obstacles, performs small gestures: to wait, to listen, to pay attention at sound and luminous stimuli, find confidence by adjusting clothes, hair, to react to the requests of the authors, to « rebuke » those who have led him into this situation, to look for support, to struggle against the stiffening of their body. To falter, to get wrong, to start again. To smile, to laugh, to embark upon the experience with humor and self-irony.

The sound of the ambiance of the languages

Once the participants have let themselves fall from « high words » in this third time to reproduce the experience and its polyphonic melody, the multimedia product misleads the listener by detaching the voices and the images. Playing with the sounds of the different recording devices, it blurs and defines other paths, it suddenly takes the distance from the participants met up during the experience and that they have embodied a language to finally give to understand a single common melody, the melody of things.

* « Metamorphosis effect »: « A perceptive effect describing the unstable and changing relations between elements of a sound ensemble. (…) The ancient Greek word metabolos (in French « métabole ») means that which is variable – something that is in metamorphosis. Our considered modification here involves the relation between elements that compose the sound environment, defined as addition and superimposition of multiple sources heard simultaneously ». Jean-François Augoyard, Henry Torgue (eds.), Sonic Experience. A guide to everyday sounds. (trans. A.McCartney & D.Paquette), Montreal, McGill Queen’s University Press, 2006, p 73-74

Metadata:

Title: The Sound of the Ambiance Languages

Duration: 13’46

Audio visual production: © Aurore Bonnet & Valerio Signorelli

based on a proposition by Jean-Paul Thibaud and Daniel Siret

Context: First seminar of the CNRS GDRI Translating Ambiances, International Ambiances Network

Location: Nantes (FR)

Date: September 9th 12th 2014

Technical devices:

2 cameras: a mobile camera for close-up, focused on grabbing the tiny expressions of the participants (gaze, smile, breathing) ; a fixed camera for close-medium shot to capture the « materialisation » of the experience, the gestures and the interactions.

2 additional sound recordings: a lavalier microphone for the reader; a directional microphone stand next to the fixed camera.

4 places in the city of Nantes: Loire banks next to the bridge Duchess Anne, Place Graslin, the terrace and the « place centrale » of the National School of Architecture in Nantes.

9 languages: German, English, Arabic (Egypt), Danish, Spanish, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil).

48 hours: time allotted to complete and deliver the first version of this audio visual exploration (recordings, editing and broadcasting at the seminar).

Contacts

aurore.bonnet@cerma.archi.fr

valerio.signorelli@cerma.archi.fr

Tuesday September 9, 2014

Seminar of the GDRI Translating Ambiances

Wednesday September 10, 2014

Seminar of the GDRI Translating Ambiances (following)

Thursday September 11, 2014

The International Ambiances Network: outcomes, projects and governance

Friday September 12, 2014

The Ambiances Journal: presentation and prospects

Outcome of the GDRI 1st seminar

Translating ambiances: Linguistic Translations

Jean-Paul Thibaud

This account is based on the various contributions and many debates in the course of the two-day gathering. Our thanks to all those who took part in the seminar.

Other written documents may consolidate this account, drawing on the scientific papers themselves, summaries proposed at the end of the meeting, output from the workshop and experimentation on the music of language.

Fifty-two people, from ten different countries, took part in the seminar.

The proceedings used two main languages – French & English – (though not exclusively).

Presentation of the seminar

The first form of translation consists in looking for words in other languages equivalent to the French term ‘ambiance’. Obviously there is no exact equivalent for the word in English, Italian, Danish or Portuguese. So any translation work must focus on the differences between cultures and bring into play the ‘linguistic hospitality’ advocated by Paul Ricoeur. Putting the foreign language to the test in this way therefore means giving up the pretence of a perfect, literal translation, and adopting in its place a series of reformulations. In looking for equivalents and wondering which is the best possible version, a new semantic field opens on each occasion, revealing new ways of dividing up reality, while requiring us to clarify as much as possible our understanding of the term ambiance, which in turn reveals the potential and limits of the French word. In short language translation turns into a heuristic means of deconstructing the concept, of highlighting its implicit content, but also uncovering as yet unexplored resources and broadening the scope of its meaning. In short, our purpose here is to achieve greater clarity.

Seminar programme

The seminar involved three additional actions:

• A series of scientific papers and debates on how to translate the French word ‘ambiance’ into various languages – German, Arabic, Danish, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese. It had been planned to include English as well but the relevant person was unable to attend.
•  A workshop during which three Nantes-city ambiances – memorial to slavery, Les Machines car park, Jardin des Fonderies – were explored in situ and reported on collectively.
•  The music of language, an experiment in reading collectively a text by Rainer Maria Rilke (Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge, §16) in all the languages represented at the seminar.

The practice of translation

In response to demands for debate on how to translate the word ‘ambiance’ into other languages, a great many different ways of working on translation were deployed: working out a semantic network or cluster; going back to the etymology; highlighting accepted meanings for the term; drawing on literature; exploring everyday usage; consulting dictionaries; querying the concept of translation itself.

Several lessons may be learnt from this undertaking, leading to further research.

• A common root seems to emerge in Indo-European languages, reached from a set of terms encountered in various forms: atmosphère/atmosfera/atmosfære/atmosphere/Atmosphäre; environnement/ambiente/omgivelser/environment; climat/clima/Klima/climate. Similarities may be seen in the lexical term, family ressemblances found between shared languages and etymologies (in part for Latin words). So ambiance is not a completely ‘fuzzy’ signifier.
• In Latin languages the words derived from ambire have taken on substantially different meanings and are used in different ways depending on the language: Portuguese has both ambiente (close to the objectifiable ‘environment’) and ambiência (relating more to bodily experience); in Spanish ambiente can be used as a noun, adjective or verb. So the word should just be taken in isolation, but rather in the context of the lexical system in which it fits.
• Terms were identified which are more singular, remarkable – in some cases untranslatable – and would deserve research in themselves: hygge (Danish), barzakh (Arabic), Stimmung (German) and stemming (Danish) to which we might add the English word mood, or ma (Japanese). It would be interesting to examine other words in greater detail such as entorno (Spanish), momento and vibrazioni (Italian). The way some words are used in another language – such as entorno in Spanish – prompt us to take another look at the French equivalent (l’entour, les entours). At another level, the French term sensible, or perceptible, is obviously a valuable starting point for any consideration of the idea of ambiance in various languages.
• To find comparable terms the context of the word itself needs to be clarified: in Arabic to decide on the right translation one must first consider whether the word will be used in the singular or plural; in Greek the word must be supplemented (to indicate the sensory modality, sound, light, etc) to make it more specific with a meaning closer to that of ambiance.
• Many authors draw attention to the Latin word ambire to assert the immersive, enveloping character of ambiance. Two other important angles of attack deserve to be mentioned and explored in greater detail. On the one hand the relation to voice and tonality which seems so particular with Stimmung (German) and stemming (Danish). On the other hand the important idea of the in-between/entre-deux expressed by the word barzakh (Arabic), antariksham in the Malayalam language (a form of Sanskrit) or ma (Japanese).

Taking a fresh look at translation into other languages

Using translations of the word ambiance into other languages raises many basic questions and cannot do without more general thinking of language. Seminar participants adopted many positions and views, drawing attention to the complexity and limitations of the proposed exercise in translation.

• It is undoubtedly risky to attempt to make the word ambiance stand on its own, possibly leading to agreement on misunderstanding (to paraphrase Wittgenstein). We need to bear in mind that a word only has meaning in context, in relation to a lexical system, to an overall discourse, a system of categorization, a situation of expression, a given socio-historic moment and so on.
• Language is a plastic substance too. The term ambiance has evolved over time. New words, such as ambiancer or ambianceur have been coined. The term has circulated in different ways depending on the native language. For example ambiance seems to appear more often in British scientific papers than in their American counterparts. Terms have a life and career all of their own (the term ambiance is particularly in fashion at present, a trend which merits consideration in itself).
• If we look at translations into other languages, we need to make allowance for several phenomena which are part of the make-up of the languages themselves: diglossia, in which two languages are mixed (apparent with Tunisian French, for example; we have even encountered the expression ‘tu frances bien’); the socio-historic context which affects the internal workings of a language; the fact that Brazilian and Portuguese do not necessarily overlap, no more than British and US English, or Spanish in Europe or Latin America; the varying abilities between speakers; the asymmetric operation of languages related to colonialism; the sensory matter of the language itself (verbal/non-verbal, writing, graffiti, information technology, bodies and tattooing, etc.). All these factors are incentives to relativize an exclusively lexical approach. Even more broadly, can we avoid thematizating the body in this exercise of translating ambiances (see the minutes of a workshop which proposed a full-scale performance to render the in situ experience of a Nantes ambiance)?
• Thinking along these lines leads to other possible lines of inquiry regarding translation into other languages. Two stand out. On the one hand, a survey of the uses, values, situations and conditions in which the term ambiance surfaces in everyday language. In short, how does a terminology coalesce from everyday conversations and ordinary situations of interaction (we may be close to conversational analysis here). On the other, an ethnography of the practices of translation, which would involve observing translators themselves and what happens during their professional activity. More broadly this would entail gaining a better grasp of the language games to which the topic of ambiances lends itself and with what consequences.

Opening up to other questions

The debate on translation prompted other questions which directly concern the conception of the ambiance theme we are developing. Several basic points were raised which might be followed up in various ways by subsequent seminars.

• There is some doubt as to the category to which the term ambiance belongs. Are we dealing with an idea, a concept, a field of research, a paradigm or something else? In the same vein there is the question of the shift between everyday and scientific language (depending on the language, usage may differ between ordinary and/or specialized language). There are obviously links between the two but differences too.
• The tense relation between a word and the associated concept is a reminder of the existence of cultural, epistemological and theoretical presuppositions which make up the way we conceptualize ambiance. We could try to clarify what ambiance means for phenomenology, pragmatism or historical materialism, for instance, in order to explain as much as possible their respective positions and the connections between them. The aim is to work on the borders and bridges, to work ‘between’, on the points of passage between word and concept.
• Similarly, it would be interesting to reveal the scientific styles of each researcher giving an account of the negotiations in which we are engaged with various key authors. Authors such as Goffman, Heidegger and Böhme were mentioned. One important reference would lend itself particularly to collective discussion, being directly related to the subject of this research group: how do we stand in relation to actor-network theory, as propounded by Bruno Latour for instance? Surely a sociology of translation of this sort would deserve detailed collective consideration (particularly as ambiance and translation are not in a relation of co-constitution, British researchers draw on ANT a great deal to thematize the idea of atmosphere, and there is already an ANT proposition on atmospheres – see Making Things Public).
• Two basic topics demanding discussion were barely touched upon. One topic concerns the pre-linguistic dimension of experiencing ambiance. One may assert that the bodily experience which constitutes an ambiance cannot be reduced to language, or indeed underline that the senses can never be separated from meanings and language. Should we situate language at the same level as conscious representation or emphasize the historic dimension which constitutes the workings of a language? The other topic relates to the question of empathy in the theme of ambiances and how this issue can fit into dialogue with the recognition of the divergences, controversies and disagreements inherent in any social life.

(Miles Davis)

So what?

Several times speakers asked about the contribution, consequences and finality of such work on translations into other languages. Is there not the risk of indulging in too academic an exercise? Does such inquiry help our research progress? Surely a pragmatist posture with regard to ambiance would help us in our work on the effects and operating modes of such a field?

• As we learned from an earlier project (see L’Aventure des Mots de la Ville, a collective effort headed by Christian Topalov) city words serve not only to describe but also contribute to constituting. The present work on language translations enables us to acknowledge and bring into play the performative power of language. Far from being neutral or without consequence, words play an essential part in framing the problematiques, positions and environments on which we work. In particular translations relating to ambiance enable us to put into perspective our own sensory relation to the city (by developing new categories, new forms of attention to the world around us); they also test the apparent obviousness of the language we use.
• In more concrete terms discussion focused on the relation between word and space. The link between language and space cannot be disregarded in any analysis of discourse. Several questions were raised. Does working together on ambiance mean that we share the same conception of space? What does the idea of ambiance conceal, underpin or imply in spatial terms? What can ambiance tell us that is new about the processes of spatialization and production of (urban) space, and to what extent does it change the way we intervene in the public space? How does the work of translation enable us to generate feedback on genuinely urban questions, such as the concepts of the limitless city, or informal settlement? Should we not do more to make explicit the connections between analysis and design (the focus of the fourth seminar)? Or indeed, what do the processes used to produce ambiance(s) tell us about current urban trends (increasing emphasis on trade, heritage, private ownership and standardization)?
• Finally how does this collective work on translation affect our own research? What place does this work have for us individually? What will each of us derive from this translation exercise for their own work? In retrospect, what will this seminar contribute to each discipline? How do these differences between languages impact on research on ambiance?

Many questions have been raised which go beyond purely lexical or even linguistic issues, opening the way for discussions relating to theory, concept, methodology and practice. Future GDRI seminars could focus on such questions.