Sharawadji Mix

What is that? 

What did I just hear? 

The urban sound field is a mixture of accidental sound, the sound which is a byproduct of activity: car engines, construction, footsteps, natural sounds of wind, rain, and intentional sounds: horns and sirens, voices, bird calls, music. 

A disordered field allows for self-ordering, self-idiom. It is a field of potential, of play.

In the field of sound you notice one thing, then another, then your attention sinks back into the whole.

We are made for this, this disorder.

The sharawadji effect edges up on the sublime. It is a plenitude that is almost too much.

A sound has a source, but we do not always know that source.

I wander.

Why sharawadji, why now?

Is that you?

In 1916, Luigi Russolo exalted the beauty of noises: “The street is an infinite mine of noises: thy rhythmic strides of the various trots or paces of horses, contrasting with the harmonic scales of trams or automobiles. . . And over all these noises, the continuous, very strange and marvelous hubbub of the crowd, of which only the few voices that arrive clear and distinct can be distinguished from the others, so anonymous and confused.”

I walk through the garden hearing cars.

This world calls out to us.

In the disordered sound field of the city, we can let our attention drift and play.

I walk through you.

The mind amplifies one sound, then another.

I walk through the infinite garden. Wind shakes the leaves. Rain comes, then sun. Trunks, stalks, fruit, leaves, fronds, vines, flowers: the names only gesture to the forms, the forms to the tangle.

Pauline Oliveros uses the words “deep listening” to speak of a slow inclusive listening that expands to include everything in the environment that the ear can perceive. 

I walk through the garden hearing cars.

We get the word “sharawadji” from William Temple, in his essay “The Gardens of Epicurus” published in 1685. He heard, by word of mouth through Dutch traders, of an Asian form of beauty he had never imagined. The gardens he heard described were not rows of orderly shrubs and trees in geometric patterns, but rather an aesthetic arrangement of plants and vistas without apparent order: “sharawadji.”

An environment that remains continuous allows attention to move in its own idiom.

William James said, “What I experience is what I agree to attend to.”

There is no distinction between landscape and soundscape.

When we say “the earth” it seems like an object, a comprehensible ball hanging in space, but we know it does not hang, rather it hurtles and spins in a three-dimensional spirographic twist. When fully attended to, the smallest thing becomes infinite, infinite in its histories and actions. How much greater, then, the infinite entanglement of all that is the earth.

One way to speak of the aesthetic effect of an overwhelming and accidental field of sound is “sharawadji.”

You are the city I walk through, as if in a garden.

The beginningless and the endless.

The sharawadji of the city hints at how we might love the world entire.

Composer Kim says: “Once we escape the tyranny of directed attention and remove our frame we find ourselves cast adrift in the meshing and mixing of indeterminate sounds forming a flux-field of energy, a tapestry of interwoven routines, conspiring to ignite the soul or grain of a place. ‘Grain; is the ineffable and sometimes inexplicable quality that infuses a place; a transcendental atmospheric sum greater than its parts.”

The attentional cloud, a mist or atmosphere: a state of being where the mind floats freely, as a person wandering through the a city, as a person wandering through a garden.

Order regulates attention. Disorder frees attention.

The color green; the colors green.

It’s still not clear where the word “sharawadji,” as passed from Dutch traders to William temple, truly came from. Some have attempted to match its sounds to various combinations of Chinese characters, others to Persian sources, but the most plausible to my ear is Ciaran Murray’s argument that the word is a Dutch pronunciation of a now-obsolete Japanese term - “soro-waji,” meaning lack of alignment, disorder, asymmetry. 

Your sound never stops.

There is a romanticism, a blatant orientalism about this: the European apprehension of the oriental garden as a design of undesign, a design beyond comprehension or analysis; the European conflation of Chinese and Japanese, the appropriation of a foreign word, somewhat mangled, shorn of its extensive tradition, and yet a word, a name, can be the seed of new experience.

This world calls to us. It calls to us right here, right now

The world asks us, in this time, to love that which is too large to understand.

The color gray, the colors gray.

What makes a landscape beautiful are the parts we cannot control.

What I hear is the world. What I hear is always the world.

The boundless, which in Buddhist thought is called emptiness, “shunyata.”

Complexity that is too great to follow appears to us as disorder. Complete attention to disorder is overwhelming.

In the realm of sound, the “sharawadji effect,” or the unexpected sensation of aesthetic feeling arising from an accidental sound field, as in the sonic atmospheres of cities, was defined by Jean-François Augoyard, Henry Torgue, and the CRESSON research group as: “the feeling of plenitude that is sometimes created by the contemplation of a complex soundscape of inexplicable beauty.” They continue, “Apparent disorder constitutes the necessary, although not exclusive, condition of the sharawadji effect.”

Your uncontrollable garden of sound.

There is no garden, nothing cultivated our bounded. There is no city, no beginning and no end to what we hear.

I walk through the city under generous shade trees.

Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue, inspired by Louis Marin, claim sharawadji as an effect. An effect, they say, lies between a cause and an event. An effect is not the thing itself, but our experience of it, our collaboration with it.

The urban sound field is a mixture of accidental sound, the sound which is a byproduct of activity: car engines, construction, footsteps, natural sounds of wind, rain, and intentional sounds: horns and sirens, voices, bird calls, music. These all mix together in an everchanging immersive music, sometimes imperceptible in its familiarity.

Repetition causes habituation, and under the conditions of habituation, sensation subsides; as sensations become familiar, attention is freed.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2018 report, has given the residents of this earth twelve years to limit the coming catastrophes from rising global temperatures. Now eleven years.

Desire and interest are special cases of attention, because their impulses come from within. Attention follows desire. 

Is someone there?

Tim Ingold writes: “Now the mundane term for what I have called the fluxes of the medium is weather. So long as we are - as we say - “out in the open,” the weather is no mere phantasm, the stuff of dreams. It is, to the contrary fundamental to perception. It is not so much what we perceive as what we perceive in. We do not touch the wind, but touch in it; we do not see sunshine, but see in it; we do not hear rain, but hear in it. Thus wind. sunshine and rain, experienced as feeling, light and sound, underwrite our capacities, respectively. to touch, to see and to hear. In order to understand the phenomenon of sound (as indeed those of light and feeling), we should therefore turn our attention skywards, to the realm of the birds, rather than towards the solid earth beneath our feet. The sky is not an object of perception, any more than sound is. It is not a thing we see. It is rather luminosity itself. But in a way, it is sonority too, as the musicologist Victor Zuckerkandl explained. In the experience one has of looking up into the sky, according to Zuckerkandl, lies the essence of what it means to hear. If this is so, then our metaphors for describing auditory space should be derived not from landscape studies but from meteorology.”

This fragile earth. This delicate and vast architecture of interactions we cannot hold in mind.

"In an auditory field, people are free to listen to whatever they turn their attention to. Their listening is non-directed, their attention is free to roam, allowing them to take an active part in the creation of meaning by resurrecting the grain of the field. In this way the listener enters a non-linear, non-directed mode of reception,” says Kim Cascone.

It is a field of play.

It falls to us, to all of us here now, in this place and especially in this time, to love, to find beautiful, to become tender towards that which is beyond our sense of order, the uncontrollable vastness.

Claude Schryer says, “Searching for the Sharawadji Effect is essentially a state of awareness, in which one tends an open ear in the hopes of experiencing the sublime beauty of a given sound in an unexpected context.”

To attend is to care.

The sharawadji effect edges up on the sublime. It is a plenitude that is almost too much. 

Through the city, through the torrent of sound.

What is that?

What did I just hear?

Is that you?