Page 190 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Soundscape 173

(Beck 1993; 2006). In Sikhism, conversely, music as sacred sound is not
only integral to devotional experience but constitutes the foundations of
religious community and spiritual leadership. Central to the powers of the
historical founder of this religious tradition were his extraordinary skills in
devotional chanting, skills that not only singled him out as chosen leader
but allowed him to call on and bind together believers in shared devotional
practice (Singh 2006). Chant and music also played an eminent role in the
early transmission of scripture.
Though the existing literature on religion and sacred sound pays
primary attention to music (e.g. Beck 2006), there are strong reasons
why phenomenological approaches to the study of religious mediation
should open up the terms of analysis and use the concept of soundscape to
elucidate these processes of sensuous mediation. For one, the category of
“sacred music” does not correspond to any equivalent conception or “emic
category” in certain cultural and religious contexts. Sound, as a category
encompassing a wide variety of aural perception, is more useful to make
sense of the diversity of ways in which relations between the oral, aural, and
transcendent are conceptualized and practiced.
Second, the spatial metaphor implied in soundscape pinpoints the intricate
connection between a patterned form of sonic expression (involving metric,
melodic patterning) and religious practice and their emplacement in time
and space. Seen from this analytical angle, sound production and sound
perception combine to form a site for religious experience, for an experience
of transcendental immanence, and thus for any human communication
with the divine. Finally, because sound constitutes an essential mode of
embodiment and of bodily engagement, it yields powerful capacities to move
the believer’s heart and mind, to inscribe particular sensibilities, and thus
to “tune” particular religious subjectivities. Yet, the particular significance
it has for the making of religious subjects varies not only with particular
religious tradition and regional conventions but across history.

Muslim soundscapes

Taking sound and aural perception, rather than music, as an analytical
starting point is particularly apposite in the context of Muslim religious and
mundane practice. Not only do Muslims consider Qur’anic recitation, as a
principal and unique sonic form of Muslim religious practice and experience
(whether in its simple style [murattal] or melodically more elaborate version
[mujawwad]), to be conceptually distinct from “music”; the question of
whether music should be performed and enjoyed at all in Muslim societies has
remained a thorny and unresolved object of debate among Muslim scholars.
This does not preclude the spiritual, aesthetic, and affective richness of sound