A Philosophy of Ambient Sound:

Materiality, Technology, Art and the

Sonic Environment Ulrik Schmidt
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN SOUND

A Philosophy of
Ambient Sound
Materiality, Technology, Art and the Sonic Environment

Ulrik Schmidt
Palgrave Studies in Sound

Series Editor
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, Musik
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Palgrave Studies in Sound is an interdisciplinary series devoted to the
topic of sound with each volume framing and focusing on sound as it is
conceptualized in a specific context or field. In its broad reach, Studies in
Sound aims to illuminate not only the diversity and complexity of our
understanding and experience of sound but also the myriad ways in
which sound is conceptualized and utilized in diverse domains. The series
is edited by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, The Obel Professor of Music at
Aalborg University, and is curated by members of the university’s Music
and Sound Knowledge Group.

Editorial Board:
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (series editor)
Martin Knakkergaard
Mads Walther-Hansen

Editorial Committee:
Michael Bull
Barry Truax
Trevor Cox
Karen Collins
 Ulrik Schmidt

A Philosophy of
Ambient Sound
Materiality, Technology, Art
and the Sonic Environment
Ulrik Schmidt
Roskilde University
Roskilde, Denmark

ISSN 2633-5875     ISSN 2633-5883 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Sound
ISBN 978-981-99-1754-9    ISBN 978-981-99-1755-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1755-6

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In memory of Henrik Schmidt
 Acknowledgments

This book is the result of my year-long interest in the cross-disciplinary

fields of media philosophy, environmental sound and material aesthetics.
I am very grateful to the many people who have shared their perspectives
with me over the years, and for their continuous belief in the beauty of a
critical and dedicated exchange of thought. I wish to thank Mark
Grimshaw, the series editor of the Palgrave Studies in Sound, for his
encouragement and invaluable support in the early stages of the project.
Thanks to Marion Duval, Connie Li and the whole editorial staff at
Palgrave Macmillan for enabling a smooth, flexible and truly joyful pro-
cess. A special thanks to Holger Schulze and Jordan Lacey for kindly
supporting the project, and to Jordan for rich and valuable critique.
Thanks to my wonderful colleagues and students at Roskilde University.
And thanks to my dear friends and collaborators in the field of sound,
media and art for stimulating collaborations, passionate discussions and
a lot of fun, including Anja Mølle Lindelof, Anita Mašková, Anette
Vandsø, Jacob Lund, Jacob Ørum, Jakob Sand, Jens Hjortkjær, Henrik
B. Andersen, Henrik Oxvig, Honza Hoeck, Inger Berling Hyams, Macon
Holt, Mads Walther-Hansen, Martin Søberg, Morten Søndergaard,
Rasmus Holmboe, Rune Søchting, Sanne Krogh Groth, Tobias Kirstein,
Torben Sangild, Thomas Bitsch Jørgensen and everyone at Seismograf.
Thanks also to Annette Hauer, Paul Bridgwater and Jørgen I. Jensen.

vii
viii Acknowledgments

A dear thanks to my mom and dad, Lone and Henrik Schmidt, for their
lifelong support. And above all, thank you to Vera and Kristiane for
patiently living with the loneliness of the project, and for continuously
reminding me of the joys and wonders of everyday life outside of it. The
book is generously supported by a research grant from the Carlsberg
Foundation, for which I am truly thankful. I dedicate the book to the
memory of my father, Henrik Schmidt.
 Contents

1 I ntroduction  1
The ‘Problem’ of Ambient Sound    3
The Concept of Ambient Sound    5
Sonic Environmentality   8
Surroundability  11
Onto-aesthetics  16
Perspectives and Aims   19
Bibliography  31

Part I Fields  35

2 E
 ffects of Being-in 37
Toward a Material Morphology of Ambient Sound   37
Sound as Furniture   41
Centralization and Decentralization   44
Bibliography  49

3 Environmental
 and Surrounding Sounds 51
From Environmental to Surrounding Sounds   51
Objectivity and Environmentality   52

ix
x Contents

Objectlessness  59
The A-figurative Continuum   65
Bibliography  73

4 F
 ield Effects 77
Univocity and Consistency   77
Ubiquity  80
Immanence and Immersion   81
Toward the Ground   89
Groundlessness  92
Continuous Variation  96
Bibliography 104

Part II Strategies 107

5 S
 onic Mediatization109
Environmentality Without Ecology  109
What Is Mediatization?  112
Mediation and Mediatization  115
Acousmatics and Mediatization  118
Medium Effects, Phonogeny and Mediatization  124
Bibliography 131

6 S
 ynthetic Strategies133
From Reproduction Sensibilities to Production Sensibilities  133
Synthetic and Organic Matter  137
Synthetic Sound and Technology  139
Sound Masses  144
Generalized Pop  148
Bibliography 156

7 A
 mbient Sound Design159
Sound Design and the Production of Audiovisual Immanence  159
The Sonic Environment in Classic Cinema  160
 Contents xi

The Contemporary Audiovisual Scene  165

The Emancipation of Ambient Sound  168
Sonic Intensification of Audiovisual Space  170
Bibliography 178

Part III Frames 181

8 S
 taging Ambient Listening183
Technology and Listening  183
The Synthetic Production of the Listening Environment  185
The Double Mediality of Technological Listening  188
Staging the Ambient Listening Environment  194
Bibliography 199

9 Architectures
 of Acoustic Immanence203
Mediatization of Acoustic Space  203
Enhanced Reverberation  205
Acousmatization and Mediatization of the Acoustic Interior  207
Anti-reverberatory Purification  211
Bibliography 214

10 A
 mplified Surrounds215
Amplified Expansion and Centralization  215
Cinematic Surround Sound  218
Non-cinematic Surround Sound  223
Bibliography 234

11 Mobile
 Infrastructures of Everyday Listening237
Headphone Bubbles and Their Surroundings  238
Inside the Cocoon  242
Infrastructures of Environmental Distribution  245
Streaming Infrastructures and Bubbles of Ubiquity  247
Bibliography 252
xii Contents

12 Epilogue:
 Generic, Inattentive, Asocial255
Bibliography 263

B
 ibliography265

I ndex281
 List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Schematic summary of Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of

organic and inorganic matter 139
Fig. 6.2 The three techno-aesthetic paradigms of sonic space 140
Fig. 8.1 The double mediality of technological listening between
audile and ambient techniques 193

xiii
 1
Introduction

The production of surroundability is a basic condition of modern life and

its effects have only increased—for better or for worse. Today surround-
ings are designed more meticulously, promoted more forcefully and
desired more passionately than ever before. Everything is, to a growing
extent, being connected and shaped to attract attention, and even the
most mundane, peripheral and indiscernible event can have the greatest
environmental impact. Every aspect of the environment, foreground and
background, center and periphery, important and less important parts,
are rendered simultaneous, ever present and co-affective. Overarching
societal and cultural processes of Western modernity—urbanization,
industrialization, mediatization, globalization, commercialization, aes-
theticization—are in large part environmentally constituted. “Modernity
means,” as Peter Sloterdijk puts it, “that also the background becomes a
product.”1 Processes of environmental expansion, connectivity, synchro-
nization, compression and consolidation and of environmental enhance-
ment, management, investment, acceleration—they all contribute to
bringing forth and rendering sensible that which used to linger impercep-
tibly and unattended somewhere beyond the horizon in the premodern
world of familiarity, proximity and tangibility. With an ever-growing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 1
U. Schmidt, A Philosophy of Ambient Sound, Palgrave Studies in Sound,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1755-6_1
2 U. Schmidt

intensity, the surrounding environment of modern life was expanded and

promoted as an aesthetic, economic and social matter, which increasingly
encouraged its inhabitants to select and design their environments and to
direct their attention and desires toward them for meaning, security,
comfort and extraordinary experiences. We, the inhabitants of modern
habitats and habits, communicate in the surroundings, and we develop
new technologies and materials for the sole purpose of designing, rede-
signing and controlling them. The surrounding environment has become
a dominant vehicle in the current global societies of risk and control,
affective capitalism, attention ecology and aestheticized governmentality,
providing a common nest for the ongoing production of new regulations,
new spectacles, new behaviors, new fears and new desires.2
The invention of technical media, one of the key manifestations and
symbolic expressions of modernity, has a particular role in promoting this
sociocultural and ethico-aesthetic turn toward the environment. This
process, however, is not simply about media becoming more environ-
mental. It is also about the environment becoming more operative as a
form of medium, and technical media just make this general mediality of
the environment more evident, more habitual, more manipulatable and
more aggressively affective. As Erich Hörl argues in a pertinent passage,
we have, since around 2000, witnessed:

the emergence of an environmental culture of control that, thanks to the

radical environmental distribution of agency by environmental media
technologies, ranging from sensorial to algorithmic environments, from
bio- to nano- and geotechnologies, renders environmentality visible and
prioritizes it like never before. It thus ends the longstanding forgetting and
denial of the environment and, moreover, raises it to the status of a new
universal principle. This phase is the first to be genuinely environmental.
In other words, it is only with this phase that environmentality in the wid-
est sense becomes problematic and takes the form of a new […] mode of
governmentality; its main problem is the capture and the control, the man-
agement, the modulation of behavior, of affects, of relations, of intensities,
and of forces by means of environmental (media) technologies whose scope
ultimately borders on the cosmic. (Hörl 2017, p. 9-10)

In the most general sense, then, media technologies have developed

into encompassing environments—and environments have in turn begun
 1 Introduction 3

to operate as encompassing mediums—which condition our worldly sen-

sations, perceptions and conceptions. Environments and media have
become habitual and inhabitable world-making medium-environments,
providing and conditioning the elemental frameworks we live in and
from where we make sense of and connect with the world around us.3 As
John Durham Peters notes, media “are vessels and environments, con-
tainers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are
doing possible” (Peters 2015, p. 2). And according to Mark B.N. Hansen,
“twenty-first-century media are largely environmental in their scope,
which means that they affect the materiality of experience at a level more
elemental than that of perception […] in favor of sensation—or rather
what I shall call ‘Worldly sensibility’” (Hansen 2015, p. 46).
Crucially, this worldly, often imperceptible but usually highly sensible,
environmentalization of media, this mediatization of the sensible envi-
ronment, is not essentially technological, although it is often radically
intensified by technology. Whether the surrounding environment
becomes more surrounding and environmental because of media tech-
nologies or not is not the question. What is important is how the sur-
roundability of the surrounding environment increases because it
becomes more mediatic, controllable and designable as medium—and
what it means for our being, thoughts, experiences and desires that it
does. What this means and how this comes about must necessarily be
examined and grasped beyond definite distinctions between the ‘natural’
and the ‘artificial’—between natural and artificial environments and
between natural and artificial mediums.4 Surroundability and environ-
mentality are everywhere—for better or for worse.

The ‘Problem’ of Ambient Sound

Sound arguably plays a crucial role in this general turn toward the envi-
ronment as a desirable, manipulatable, inhabitable and habitual medium.
Again, this process is not just about inventing and using more sonic
media technologies more often, and nor is it about their increased envi-
ronmentality alone (although the pervasiveness of phenomena such as
background music, sonic streaming, mobile listening devices, surround
4 U. Schmidt

sound and audiovisual social media are obviously important factors).

Sound is mediatic and environmental independent of and beyond the
invention and use of specific technologies. Hence, the possibility of tech-
nological sound (re)production does not essentially alter the ontological
status of sound as mediatic and environmental but only expands its oper-
ative and affective potentials. Taking a realist and materialist ontological
perspective, we can characterize sound as a complex, fundamentally eco-
logical event that connects partly dissociated instances (a sound’s cause,
source and effect) to stir an elemental medium into vibration throughout
the environment. Furthermore, each sound is (in)formed according to
the material conditions of the environment, including its potential inter-
ference with other sounds. A sound is thus defined in part by the complex
distribution of energy and information between its cause, source, effect
and medium that generates ecological disturbance in an environmental,
vibrant medium, the vibration of which in turn is the sound as material
event.5 This perspective, in other words, entails a conception of sound as
the potential becoming operative, effective, affective and audible of sonic
matter in and as an environmental matter-medium.6
With sound being a central factor in the general environmentalization
of culture and society, the study of sonic environments and their impact
on aesthetic and sociocultural practice thus possesses an enormous ana-
lytical and critical potential. Environmental issues have for obvious rea-
sons become of general concern in recent years, in the humanities, social
sciences and the arts and in society at large. The role of sound and the
sonic environment in this ‘environmental turn’ has accordingly contin-
ued to gain new relevance. In addition, the increase in the techno-­
aesthetic environmentalization of sound and media stresses the need for
a more extensive clarification of the intimate relations between sound,
medium and environment: How can we think the equation sound =
medium = environment and what does it entail to do so? To embark on
such an exploration in thought is the main ambition of this book. It
builds on the general conjecture that understanding how we engage with
our sonic surroundings as a mediatized environment and environmental
matter-medium can provide fundamental insight into what it’s like to
live, communicate, sense and make sense in a hyper-aestheticized culture
of environmental affectivity, intensification and control. What does it
 1 Introduction 5

mean for our relationship with the world—with sounds, things, informa-
tion and people around us—when they are felt, and wanted to be felt, as
something we are surrounded by? How do we relate to sounds when they
mainly affect us as accumulative parts of a larger mass of generalized envi-
ronmentality? What does it mean, in a sociocultural and philosophical
perspective, when things, signs and information are no longer seen as
individual occurrences that occupy an independent, particular and
delimited position in time and space, but are brought together and spread
out into the environment as a heterogeneous all-encompassing whole?
Taking such questions as a guiding framework, the book proposes and
explores ambient sound as a key issue and basic philosophical ‘problem’
in sound studies, media philosophy and the aesthetics of sound. I pose
ambient sound as a ‘problem’ not only to stress its inescapable, yet still
partly ignored, formative and affective influence in the general history of
sound and listening: from the aesthetic impact of technological (re)pro-
duction on ambient listening to ambient sound’s role in the general pro-
duction of subjectivity and sociocultural relations to leading ambient
trends in artistic practice to the sociopolitical implications of a spectacu-
lar ambient aestheticization and environmentalization of everyday audi-
tory life. Moreover, ambient sound also constitutes a key problem in and
for sound studies and sonic thinking. Most notably, the theorization of
ambient sound and the sonic environment is for the most part conceptu-
ally obscured by ambiguity and ambivalence. As a consequence, there still
doesn’t seem to be much scholarly consensus about what precisely consti-
tutes the ambient dimension of sound and sonic environments—and
thus how and to what extent this dimension has influenced the history
and aesthetics of sonic technology, music and sound art, listening prac-
tices, and the general sociopolitical impact of environmental sound on
modern and contemporary auditory life.

The Concept of Ambient Sound

Ambient is a basic concept for the surroundings and how we produce and
experience them. In a remarkable text from 1942, “Milieu and Ambiance,”
the Austrian-American philologist Leo Spitzer maps out, in staggering
6 U. Schmidt

detail, the development of the concept of ‘ambient’ from the pre-Socratic

philosophers over the first Latin uses and further throughout the Western
history of ideas to the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl
and Martin Heidegger. According to Spitzer, the term ‘ambient’ (and its
modern derivation ‘ambiance’/‘ambience’) is rooted in the Latin ambire,
which means to ‘go around’ (Spitzer 1942b, p. 186). Ambire, in turn,
derived from the Latin translation of the Greek term periēchon, the mean-
ing of which Spitzer defines as “that which surrounds, encompasses.”7
Accordingly, the adjective ‘ambient’—observable in common terms such
as ‘ambient air,’ ‘ambient space’ and, of course, ‘ambient sound’—denotes
a basic surroundability of a phenomenon; its capacity and tendency to
expand, pervade, circulate, encircle and encompass in time and space.
Throughout history this general ambient feature of surroundability has
taken quite different meanings in various contexts. As a term, ‘ambient’
has thus etymologically been closely connected—in some cases almost
synonymously—with a wide range of other key concepts such as air,
ether, cosmos, atmosphere, envelopment, embrace, enclosure, circulation,
periphery, middle, inbetweenness and, perhaps most important in this con-
text, medium and environment.8 In a sense, to be ambient has always
implied a simultaneous capacity and propensity to be mediatic and envi-
ronmental—in medias res, environing.
Perhaps due to this long, winding history and utter complexity of the
term, the meaning and terminological application of the very word
‘ambient’/‘ambience’/‘ambiance’ is notoriously confused and tangled up
in a mesh of conceptual ambiguity. And the field of sound studies is cer-
tainly not an exception to the case. Key terms such as environmental
sound, sonic environment, soundscape, ecology, atmosphere, ambiance and
ambient sound tend to be used almost interchangeably—as if all we
needed was a general idea of sonic environmentality. The tendency to
conflate the different environmental terms (especially ambient/ambience/
ambiance/atmosphere) is thus widespread, and examples are far too
numerous and differentiated to allow for a satisfactory overview here.9
Instead, I wish to call attention to one notable example, in the field of
sound studies, of an explicit conflation of atmosphere and ambiance by
considering the influential work on urban ambiance by Jean-François
Augoyard (2004) and, in particular, Jean-Paul Thibaud (2011a, b, c,
2015, 2017a).
 1 Introduction 7

While Thibaud has recently discussed the etymological complexity of

the term ‘ambiance’ (Thibaud 2020), he explicitly connects, in several
other writings, ambiance (and secondarily ambient sound) with the
embodied ‘attunement’ to a specific place, and to particular qualities of
site-specific situatedness and emotional presence typically associated with
Stimmung and atmosphere. “For instance,” he notes, “an ambiance can be
specified by its ‘tone’ (an affective tonality), it involves our ability to be
‘in tune’ with the place, it has something to do with ‘sympathy’ and ‘har-
mony’ ... We speak sometimes of ‘a vibrant atmosphere’” (Thibaud 2011a,
unpaginated). This understanding of ambiance as associated with a sym-
pathetic presence and situatedness stems in part from the notion of atmo-
sphere developed by Gernot Böhme (1995, 2001, 2017), who has been a
crucial reference and inspiration for several key thinkers of sonic ambi-
ence, including Jean-Paul Thibaud (2017b).
As I will seek to substantiate throughout the book, the concept of
ambient sound I develop and theorize here differs quite considerably
from, and at times poses a direct challenge to, the atmospheric notion of
sonic ‘ambiance’ as employed by Böhme, Thibaud and many others.
Indeed, as I will argue, ambient sound and ambiance/atmosphere in fact
and effect denote two distinct and separate dimensions of the sonic envi-
ronment, each with their own aesthetic potentials and implications. Such
a clear and unequivocal differentiation is in part supported by the etymo-
logical development of the terms. While the term ‘ambient,’ as men-
tioned, stems from early Latin translations of Aristotle to denote notions
of surroundability and envelopment, ‘ambiance’ is an entirely modern
term, intimately connected to the more emotional or ‘spiritual’ notion of
atmosphere. Hence, when the term ambiance, as Spitzer notes (1942b,
p. 186), was first introduced in French in 1891, and shortly after in
English as both ‘ambiance’ and ‘ambience’, it was “a word evocative of a
spiritual climate or atmosphere, emanating from, hovering over, a
milieu—or even a thing” (ibid., p. 188). In essence, atmosphere/ambiance/
ambience is a form of “spiritual περιέχον [periēchon]” (ibid., p. 199).
The emotional attunement and site-specific presence, which Thibaud
associates with the notion of sonic ambiance, thus accords finely with the
term’s etymological origins. Yet, at the same time, the ‘spiritual’ or emo-
tional connotations of ambiance is precisely what makes the term
8 U. Schmidt

unsuitable for describing distinctly ambient effects such as surroundabil-

ity, ubiquity, decentralization and unobtrusiveness—effects which have
less, if anything, to do with either tone, place, attunement, harmony or
sympathy. And more importantly, it prevents entirely any comprehensive
conceptualization of other key components of ambient sound that are in
direct conflict with any ‘spiritual’ notion of sonic environmentality,
including effects of deterritorialization, dehumanization, massification,
synthetization, sensory isolation and many others. In short, to properly
understand the immense influence of the specifically ambient dimension
of the sonic environment on modern sonic art, technology and auditory
life, we need a non-atmospheric concept of ambient sound.
In addition, we need a broad and general concept of ambient sound. As
Thibaud notes, he limits his understanding of sonic ambience to include
the sound of urban public space: “when I speak of ambiance, I am refer-
ring to architectural and urban ambiances. The idea is not to explore
ambiance or atmosphere in general, as a generic notion, as a wide and
vague term. On the contrary, the notion refers to various specific sensory
experiences always situated and spatially contextualized” (2011a, unpagi-
nated). By contrast, I will insist on the necessity of a general conception
and conceptualization of ambient sound and listening across specific his-
torical and sociocultural contexts, musical and artistic genres, lived prac-
tices and theoretical perspectives. To be ambient, and to want to be
ambient, is both a technological, artistic, socio-material and experiential
matter. And I take this wide and general approach precisely to avoid the
conceptual vagueness of a too fragmented, local and specific theorization.
Wide and general phenomena need wide and general concepts.

Sonic Environmentality
If environmental sound is the property of a sound as being in and of the
environment, a sonic environment is the collection and merging of envi-
ronmental sounds into a heterogeneous vibrant whole, which provides a
potentially meaningful, affective and environing medium for a potential
listener. Consider the environmental sounds of, for instance, an air con-
ditioning unit; a big plane flying over the house; the wind in the trees; the
 1 Introduction 9

voice of a news reporter on television; the sound of your own feet walking
on the pavement; a dog barking somewhere in the distance; music play-
ing or neighbors quarreling next door; or the sudden vibrant sound of an
incoming phone call. These different forms of environmental sound
point to different environmental processes, functions and activities with
different signifying and affective potentials. Some environmental sounds
are indicators of a specific event occurring in a specific moment and a
specific location, whereas others fill the space as constants permeating the
entire environment. Some sounds are closely related to other sounds (by
shape, proximity, contextual meaning, etc.), others are not. Some sounds
are technologically mediated, others are not. And some sounds express
subjective and social relations, states and emotions, others do not. In this
way, each sonic environment is defined by the specific ways in which it
combines different forms of environmental sound with different signify-
ing and affective potentials. However obvious this observation may be, it
arguably pinpoints some of the most intricate difficulties with how to
conceptualize the functions, meanings and aesthetic potentials of the
sonic environment—and thus of ambient sound more specifically.
R. Murray Schafer, a pioneer in sparking the interest in sound environ-
ments and sonic ecology, famously introduced the term soundscape as a
general, all-embracing term denoting “any acoustic field of study” (1994,
p. 7). He proposed a simple compositional structure for the soundscape
centered around a few significant features: keynote sounds, sound marks
and sound signals. However, as I will discuss in more detail later, this
conception implies a hierarchical understanding of what a sonic environ-
ment is and how it conditions listening, which is arguably limited and,
on crucial points, thoroughly misconceived. Furthermore, the term
‘soundscape’ is, as Jonathan Sterne, Christine Guillebaud and many oth-
ers have argued, notoriously imbued with analogies of visuality, musical-
ity, frontality, flatness, distance, structural stability and cultural privilege.10
The legacy and quality of Schafer’s work notwithstanding, we thus argu-
ably need other—less hierarchical, distant, static and musical—concep-
tualizations of sonic environmentality to truly grasp the sociocultural
impact, functioning and aesthetic potentials of the sonic environment in
general and of ambient sound in particular. We need, to paraphrase John
Cage’s famous dictum with a small alteration, to let ambient sounds ‘be
10 U. Schmidt

themselves’ rather than vehicles for hierarchical structurization, musical

analogies and cultural valuations of taste.
In addition, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere (Schmidt 2019),
Schafer’s theory of the soundscape implies, in contrast to his general
intentions, the promotion of an analytic approach to sonic environments
in which the very environmentality of the soundscape, its very potential
to affect as an environment, is outshined by an essentially ‘non-­
environmental’ listening to individual (categories of ) sounds in the envi-
ronment.11 Although sonic environments have been of scholarly concern
since at least the 1960s, where Schafer published his first writings, the
very environmental properties and capacities of the sonic environment,
the way it functions and affects as environment, has arguably been some-
what neglected. With a Heideggerian phrase, we might even speak of a
partial ‘forgetting’ of the very environmental nature of the sonic environ-
ment. To insist on the environmental qualities and affective potentials of
the environment, I will, in line with Hörl’s general ecology, propose the
term sonic environmentality to describe the material, performative and
affective capacities of the sonic environment as environment. The notion
of sonic environmentality is adapted from a phrase in Heidegger’s Sein
und Zeit (1927) where he, inspired by the writings of Jakob von Uexküll,
speaks of “environmentality” (Umweltlichkeit) as “the worldliness of the
surrounding world” (Heidegger 1996, p. 62).
To insist on the environmentality of sound is to insist on the need to
raise general questions regarding the very relation between sound, listener
and environment: What are the material conditions and onto-aesthetic
implications of listening to and staging sound as environment? What
does it mean to be affected by the sonic environment as environment and
not as a set of individual sounds in the environment? And what perspec-
tives and conceptual frameworks will allow us to distinguish between
different types of sonic environments and different ways of being affected by
them? I propose a distinction between three basic aspects of sonic envi-
ronmentality, three key dimensions of the way sound performs and affects
us as environment: sonic ecology, sonic atmosphere and ambient sound.
In sound studies specifically and in aesthetic analyses of environmental
phenomena more generally, there is, as we have just seen, a widespread
tendency to use and understand the three terms as generic, all-embracing
 1 Introduction 11

and, to some extent, synonymous concepts. To enable a more consistent

and nuanced conception of sonic environmentality and its affective
potentials, I suggest, by contrast, to make a clear and explicit distinction
between ecology, atmosphere and ambient sound as constituting three
separate, yet interrelated, affective dimensions of the sonic environment.
They each express different ways in which an environment can perform
and affect as environment, each with its own distinct aesthetic potential,
and each with a specific role in the general environmentalization of
sound, auditory perception and sociocultural exchange.
The three dimensions are not mutually exclusive but co-constitutive
factors in the overall production of sonic environmentality. A sonic envi-
ronment can thus be characterized by the way it combines, articulates
and performs its ambient, atmospheric and ecological dimensions in a
specific event. Ecological environmentality emphasizes the environment’s
relational properties of sonic interconnectivity and of being mutually
involved and entangled with all its parts in a dehierarchized relationship.
Entanglement, interconnectivity and resonance are keywords of sonic
ecology. Atmospheric environmentalities, on the other hand, designate
the environment’s production of a spatially distributed, social and site-­
specific presence. An atmosphere is something that radiates from material
things, people and events to generate a particular situation of affective
environmental attunement. Atmospheres can therefore tell us something
about how it feels to be present and emotionally engaged in a specific
material environment as a site- and context-specific situation.12
Attunement, sociomaterial radiance and site-specific presence are key-
words of sonic atmosphere.13 In conjunction with sonic ecologies and
atmospheres, ambient sound, in turn, activates yet another register of the
affective relationship between sound, listener and environment. This rela-
tionship is expressed in the surroundability of the sonic environment.

Surroundability
As James J. Gibson writes, “to be ambient at a point means to surround a
position in the environment that could be occupied by an observer. The
position may or may not be occupied” (Gibson 1986, p. 65). Accordingly,
12 U. Schmidt

to have an ambient experience is to occupy a position in the environ-

ment, from which the world exposes its environing properties. In this
basic expression, sound not only exposes the environing properties of the
environment. It also entails a certain way in which this environmentality
is experienced, potentially or actually, as a form of surround. With ambi-
ent sound, in other words, the environment emphasizes its environing
properties to stimulate sensations of being surrounded in and by the envi-
ronment as a sonic surround. This intimate relationship between envi-
ronmentality and surroundability is stressed by key thinkers of the
environment from Hippolyte Taine, Jakob von Uexküll and Martin
Heidegger to James J. Gibson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.14 As
Spitzer notes, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the
term ‘milieu’ developed, with the thoughts of Taine, Uexküll and others,
from Newton’s classical notion of ambient medium (translated into French
as milieu ambiant)—in Newton a purely physical term designating “that
which surrounds a given body” (Spitzer 1942b, p. 175)—to become a
term for the immediate surroundings of living beings. The environment
started to entail a complex, enveloping field in which an individual senses,
recognizes, understands and is exposed to its world as an affective sur-
round. As Uexküll famously conceived it, the environment constitutes an
inner world, a spheric Umwelt, surrounding the individual animal as if in
a “soap bubble” of environmental interiority.15 Thus, with the modern
concept of the environment, the milieu regains its original ‘middle’ mean-
ing as “the place surrounding us, in the middle of which we are.”16
In this surrounding world in the middle of which we are, however,
some phenomena will be perceived as more surrounding and encompass-
ing and others as more isolated and individuated. While all environments
surround, some environments tend to expose their surroundability more
than others. Certain configurations, arrangements and distributions of
elements, certain material properties and certain perceptual modes will
thus emphasize the inherent ambient potentials of the environment more
than others. Sound and listening have often been distinguished as having
an intrinsic capacity for spatial envelopment: sound, obviously, is a vibratory
material that propagates, reverberates, circulates and fills our surround-
ings.17 This capacity for propagation and envelopment should not, how-
ever, lead to essentialist conclusions about ambient surroundability as
 1 Introduction 13

something that applies exclusively to sound, nor that envelopment is the

most basic and primordial dimension of sound, as it is often the case.
Light, gas, water, air—or for that sake snow, trees, screens, commodities,
crowds, cars, information, fancy odors and a vast amount of other mate-
rial phenomena—obviously have similar surrounding capacities, and
sound is expressive, communicative, informational, distinct, individu-
ated and locative as much as it is surrounding. The ambition to escape the
widespread tendency to idealize the surrounding aspects as the essence of
sound is precisely the reason for Jonathan Sterne’s well-known critique of
what he calls the “audiovisual litany”—an ideological scheme of the
senses, with “theological overtones,” that has haunted modern auditory
culture and sound studies. Sterne thus takes a stand against romantic
notions of hearing as “the sense of affect” and “the enveloping sense”
(Sterne 2003, p. 95). In the audiovisual litany he lists a set of clichés and
popular assumptions about essential differences between sound and
vision by which sound is idealized as primordially interior, spherical and
immersive in opposition to vision’s distance, directionality and perspec-
tive.18 Obviously, to avoid and navigate around this essentialist pitfall
comprises an indispensable task, and a fruitful challenge, for any explora-
tion of ambient sound, including this one.
Yet, the visual and auditory systems do obviously differ in important
respects. In his classic phenomenological analysis of listening, Don Ihde
argues that while the visual field is relatively limited and inclined to a
“forward oriented directionality”, the

auditory field as a shape does not appear so restricted to a forward orienta-

tion. As a field-shape I may hear all around me, or, as a field shape, sound
surrounds me in my embodied positionality. […] My auditory field and my
auditory focusing is not isomorphic with visual field and focus, it is omni-
directional. In the shape of the auditory field, as a surrounding thing, the
field-shape ‘exceeds’ that of the field-shape of sight. Were it to be modeled
spatially, the auditory field would have to be conceived of as a ‘sphere’
within which I am positioned, but whose ‘extent’ remains indefinite as it
reaches outward toward a horizon. But in any case as a field, the auditory
field-shape is that of a surrounding shape. […] The auditory field sur-
rounds the listener, and surroundability is an essential feature of the field-­
shape of sound. (Ihde 2007, p. 75-76)
14 U. Schmidt

Hence, compared to vision, the auditory system does, after all, argu-
ably possess some inclination toward ambient sensibilities. On the other
hand, though, audition is very far from being exclusively or primordially
ambient. Frontality, directionality and focus on isolated objects, events
and streams are obviously as essential to auditory perception as are sensa-
tions of envelopment and surroundability, learned as they are throughout
evolution and refined and promoted in modern cultural history as a gen-
eral “audile technique” of everyday mediated listening (Sterne 2003).
Learning to direct auditory attention to specific environmental events for
spatial and semantic analysis is not only a central part of the evolution of
perception. It also constitutes a crucial component in numerous techni-
cized forms of modern communication such as telegraphy, acoustic
design of theaters, concert halls, cinemas and other sonic architectures, in
telephony, and in acoustic military observation and sonic warfare
(Ouzounian 2020). Hence, while there may be some evidence in describ-
ing sound and listening as more ambiently oriented than vision, this
week inclination does not explain to any important degree the actual
functioning and impact of ambient sound as a cultural phenomenon, nor
ambient listening as cultivated, aestheticized practice. In audition, as in
other perceptual registers, ambient effects are but one dimension of a
general environmentality, and ambient sensations but one dimension of
a general system of environmental sensibility. Again, some surroundings
are more surrounding than others, and some forms of listening are more
oriented toward this surroundability than others.
But, if auditory perception does not to any essential extent constitute
an exclusive domain for ambient sensibilities compared to other registers,
what is ambient listening then? While the audiovisual litany is obviously
reductive from an ontological perspective, it sketches a set of general dis-
tinctions that are still of great importance for the study of ambient sound
and listening. Beyond the essentialist opposition between vision and
audition, its implied opposition between directionality and surroundabil-
ity thus entails a legitimate general distinction between two basic forms
of environmental affectivity and awareness that arguably applies to mul-
timodal perception on a broad level. Perception—and listening more
 1 Introduction 15

specifically—is in other words not either directional or surroundable but

both at the same time. For example, as James J. Gibson argues in his eco-
logical psychology of perception, visual perception is fundamentally
characterized by a continuous wavering between sensations of direction-
ality and surroundability: “looking-at and looking-around” comprise two
basic forms of visual perception “that naturally go together” (Gibson
1986, p. 209) in our perception of the environment.19
In specific regard to listening, Pauline Oliveros, Don Ihde and others
have made similar arguments for a close relationship between directional-
ity and surroundability. Oliveros thus distinguishes between “focal atten-
tion” and “global attention” as basic components in her idea of deep
listening and sonic awareness: “Focal attention, like a lens, produces clear
detail limited to the object of attention. Global attention is diffuse and
continually expanding to take in the whole of the space/time continuum
of sound. Sensitivity is to the flow of sounds and details are not necessar-
ily clear. […] The practice of Deep Listening encourages the balancing of
these two forms of attention so that one can flexibly employ both forms
and recognize the difference between these two forms of listening”
(Oliveros 2005, p. 13).
As we just saw, Ihde may tend to associate directionality and surround-
ability with properties inherent in the visual and auditory systems respec-
tively. He makes no further attempt, though, at essentializing the
connection. On the contrary, and in line with Oliveros, he clearly distin-
guishes auditory perception as being characterized by a “‘double’ dimen-
sionality” (Ihde 2007, p. 77) in which directionality and surroundability
are intimately connected and coexisting, yet potentially conflictual,
dimensions of environmental listening that in combination shape the act
of environmental listening in different ways in each specific situation. As
Ihde writes, “both the global, encompassing surroundability of sound,
which is most dramatic and fully present in overwhelming sounds, and
the often quite precise and definite directionality of sound presence,
which is noted in our daily ‘location’ of sounds, are constantly copresent.
For the description to be accurate, both surroundability and directional-
ity must be noted as copresent” (ibid.).
16 U. Schmidt

Onto-aesthetics
As Ihde acknowledges, directionality and surroundability are not simply
variations in perceptual attitude. They must equally be understood as
properties and qualities of the environment.20 The ambient dimension of
sonic environmentality thus both denote a surrounding property of the
world and a sensation of being in that surround: ambient surroundability
is both a specific ontological property that some environmental phenom-
ena possess, and a potential aesthetic effect that can be actualized in spe-
cific acts of listening. This understanding of a deep and intimate
relationship between ontological and aesthetic registers have often been
summarized in the concept onto-aesthetics, especially to describe the
rethinking of aesthetics, non-representational being and non-subjective,
affective sensation in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. However, the very
notion of onto-aesthetics has also been an object of critique in current
sound studies. For instance, discussing the recent material and ontologi-
cal turn in sound studies (exemplified by Christoph Cox, Steve Goodman
and Greg Hainge), Brian Kane explicitly takes a critical stance against
onto-aesthetics and what he regards as its implied defense of “a theory of
the work of art as a disclosure of its ontological condition” (Kane 2015,
p. 11). Eventually, he argues, this position risks promoting a “sound stud-
ies without auditory culture” (cf. the title of his essay), since the “argu-
ments developed by proponents of the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies
neglect the role played by auditory cultures in shaping affective responses
to sound and in ‘ontological’ claims about sound” (ibid., p. 16). Will
Schrimshaw expands on Kane’s argument and takes it in a slightly other
direction, criticizing what he sees as a widespread tendency, in ontologi-
cal thinking about sound and sound art, to equate non-representational
materialism with an aesthetics of immanence and immersion. This equa-
tion builds, Schrimshaw argues, on an unhealthy “conflation of aesthetics
and ontology” (Schrimshaw 2017, p. 110).
However, although Kane and Schrimshaw both draw on Deleuze,
their notions of onto-aesthetics arguably differ in important respects
from the Deleuzian approach I wish to pursue here.21 Most importantly,
onto-aesthetics, in the sense I will use the term, does not entail a “confla-
tion” of being (ontology) and sensation (aesthetics). It merely stresses the
 1 Introduction 17

intimate relations between them as separate, yet coupled and co-­

determining registers, by acknowledging that ontological properties have
aesthetics potentials, while not being reducible to them, just as aesthetic
effects are, partly and to different degrees, products of ontological, mate-
rial circumstances and therefore must be taken into account as such.
Thus, as Stephen Zepke notes, the Deleuzian “co-implication of ontology
and aesthetics” primarily “involves a redefinition of experience by which
its objective and subjective conditions are dissolved in the real, the reality
of the world as it becomes nothing else than itself. Art in these terms is an
autogenesis expressing the world (its real conditions) by constructing
experience (its real experience)” (Zepke 2005, p. 4). The world as mate-
rial ontological being is potentially sensible (but never only sensible) and
the sensible is in the world, which may or may not include a sensing
subject.22 To have an aesthetic experience, then, is in essence to take the
role of a miner in worldly affectivity and dig out the dormant sensible
potentials of the environment, to actualize its real but virtual effect, and
unfold them—consciously and intentionally, or utterly unawares—in a
specific act of aesthetic experience. The world as onto-aesthetic is the
material world as virtual sensation, laid out for us to actualize.
In other words, ontology and aesthetics are not conflated in an onto-­
aesthetics of ambient sound, but merely co-implicated in a mutual rela-
tionship, which is a critical difference. Ontological properties produce
ambient sound as a virtual or potential aesthetic condition for its actual-
ization in a specific sensation of being surrounded by sound. The produc-
tion of ambient sound as surroundability does not include an actual
listener, but its actualization as ambient, the actual sensation of being
surrounded, does. An onto-aesthetic approach, in these terms, exposes
the field of investigation for a general philosophy of ambient sound as an
aesthetic relation between ontological being as sonic expression and effect
and its affective potentials for listening. We must, then, consider the
ontological aspects related to ambient sound as material event: What ele-
ments constitute and produce the specifically ambient aspects of sound?
How and why can some sounds be considered more ambient than others?
And we must consider the closely related affective potentials and implied
listening modes constructed in and by ambient sound: What are the spe-
cifically ambient effects and affects of sound and how are they expressed,
18 U. Schmidt

artistically and non-artistically, in specific aesthetic events? How is ambi-

ent sound distinguished as a material construction that conditions spe-
cific forms of aesthetic engagement with sound? In short: What is ambient
sound?—how does it sound, and how is it produced? And what is ambi-
ent listening?—what affective conditions for listen are produced by ambi-
ent sound and what does it entail to listen ambiently?
While these questions indicate different philosophical problems (onto-
logical and aesthetic), only by seeing them as correlated can we grasp
ambient sound as an onto-aesthetic problem, characterized by the co-­
implication of morphological, material and technological registers and
senso-perceptual registers. And only by seeing them as correlated can we
fully address ambient sound as a key problem in modern auditory culture
and begin to mine its social, cultural and artistic implications. To practice
such a thinking of sound as an onto-aesthetic potential is arguably similar
to what Mark Grimshaw and Tom Garner, inspired by Deleuze and Brian
Massumi, describe with the term “sonic aggregate.” Sonic aggregates are
“all the components that together create the potential for the perception
of sound to emerge” (Grimshaw and Garner 2015, p. 166). Mack Hagood
also emphasizes sound as an affective potential, especially when mediated
by technologies. As he notes, this idea of sound as potential perception is
closely associated with a ‘post-phenomenological’ approach, not only as
it is explicitly outlined in and in relation to Don Ihde’s later writings, but
also as it is implied in a Deleuzian onto-aesthetics (Hagood 2019,
p. 81–84). By insisting on the active role of the material world in the
production of sensation and subjectivity, Deleuze’s onto-aesthetic phi-
losophy can thus be regarded as a profound contribution to what Mark
B.N. Hansen calls “the post-phenomenological afterlife of phenomenol-
ogy” (2015, p. 27).
This materialist, onto-aesthetic and post-phenomenological approach,
which I, inspired by Deleuze, will take toward sound and listening and
their intimate relations, differs from classical phenomenology on some
crucial points. Most importantly, it redirects the focus of classical phe-
nomenology on perception and consciousness toward the material envi-
ronment and its senso-perceptual potentials. It is a phenomenology no
longer founded on the perceiving subject but on the material worldly
being as (virtual/potential) sensation. Consequently, it recognizes: a) that
 1 Introduction 19

environmental phenomena often challenge the idea of intentionality and

directionality; b) that subjects do not autonomously constitute their
environments, as if thrown into the world from somewhere beyond, but
are entangled and co-produced with them; and c) that vibrating environ-
mental phenomena, such as sounds, do not per se provide or privilege a
‘natural’, horizonal, locational and bodily grounded form of spatial per-
ception, which is often taken for granted in classical phenomenology. An
onto-aesthetic, post-phenomenological approach to ambient sound,
then, is not so much interested in subjects and their general forms of
intentional perception (including their culturally specific and often privi-
leged perspectives). Rather, it is concerned with the potential of ambient
sound for conditioning specific forms of affective engagement and the
onto-aesthetic production of subjectivity it entails.

Perspectives and Aims

This onto-aesthetic perspective, I will argue, is not in any way opposed to
a cultural and historical understanding of ambient sound. Quite the con-
trary, it can help to emphasize the role of ambient sound in the general
cultural-historical shaping of perception, sensibility, desires and media-
tized attention in modernity.23 As I will seek to substantiate throughout
the book, ambient sound has developed into a norm or standard in many
of the most central and dominant parts of modern and contemporary
auditory culture, including the design and use of sonic technologies,
artistic practices with sound and the general aestheticization of everyday
auditory life, all of which, in both scope and impact, far exceeds ‘ambient
music’ as a genre in recent music history. I thus regard ambient sound not
so much, or not only, as a form of specialized musical expression. It is, on
a much more general historical and cultural level, a material, onto-­
aesthetic condition of sonic environmentality, produced through the
implementation of and engagement with a number of generalized tech-
nologies and cultural techniques for producing and experiencing sound,
which in turn shape and condition our particular expressive and affective
engagements with sound.
20 U. Schmidt

This is evidently the case when ambient sound and listening become
explicit goals in their own right, as in the commercial sound industry’s
promotion of remarkably, and increasingly more, ambient listening tech-
nologies (e.g., surround sound and noise cancelling headphones), stream-
ing infrastructures and portable distribution formats. Or in the full
embrace, within certain parts of contemporary sound art and museum
exhibits, of immersive sound and spectacular audiovisual installations.
But it also applies, albeit more subtly, in the pervasive tendency to employ
mediatizing and massifying strategies as a standard approach in postwar
electro-acoustic music, pop music and sound art since the early 1960s,
and in cinematic sound design, especially after 1970. This widespread,
multi-facetted influence of ambient sound in even the farthest corner of
auditory culture is, I will maintain, not in itself neither good nor bad. To
be ambient and have ambient experiences is a fundamental part of sound
and modern auditory life. Yet, it can of course be criticized, and arguably
should be, in the many cases where ambient practices settle for unimagi-
native, standardized and uncritical forms of cultural expression. For
example, Schrimshaw raises critique of how generic, immersive practices
in recent sound art have “become increasingly prevalent” and developed
into “a new orthodoxy,” especially since the introduction of digital and
interactive artforms (Schrimshaw 2017, p. 1). And in his 2013 essay
“Against Ambiance,” Seth Kim-Cohen makes a similar critique. “I’m not
inclined,” he writes, “to let the ambient off the hook by calling it some-
thing as easily slipped as ‘escapist.’ I think the dangers are far stickier than
that. What troubles me about López’s performances, about Aitken’s pavil-
ion, about Turrell’s installations, are their implications—that is to say,
their knock-on effects—on the audiences and the discourse they attract
and simultaneously produce” (Kim-Cohen 2013, p. 13).
I by and large share Schrimshaw’s and Kim-Cohen’s critical stances
toward the reduction of ambient sound to ‘sensationalism’ and sonic
spectacles of immersivity in recent sound art. However, as I have already
suggested and will substantiate extensively below, ambient sound is a
much more complex phenomenon than a mere trend in recent sound art
can represent to any fair degree, however dominant it may be. First, the
use of ambient sound in the history of sound art since the 1960s is con-
siderably more widespread, significant and multi-facetted than suggested
 1 Introduction 21

by Schrimshaw and Kim-Cohen, both in regard to its artistic, material,

historical, technological and institutional implementations and its highly
diverse forms of expressions. Second, and more importantly, ambient
sound is a considerably more fundamental philosophical problem than a
limited focus on a specific artistic style of practice alone can satisfactorily
embrace. The ambient dimension inevitably influences our basic concep-
tions of what sound is and how it affects us. It involves and exposes
sound’s intimate role in shaping our perception of basic categories such
as space, time, environment, medium and materiality. And, more specifi-
cally, it points to the deep ambient implications of overarching historical
developments in auditory culture such as the use of technologies of sound
(re)production and mediated listening, developments in infrastructures
of sonic distribution, the introduction of sound design, the dehumaniza-
tion and de-anthropomorphization of sonic expression in music and
sound art, the sonic commercialization of public space, the emergence of
pop matter as generalized sensibility and so on. By being a driving force
in these developments, and many others, ambient sound, again, raises
key questions concerning the basic philosophical, psychological, cultural
and social significance and implications of sound in modern culture. And
if considered on this level of significance and influence, it no longer
makes much sense to be ‘against ambiance.’ Rather, we should seek to
develop new concepts and gain deeper knowledge about its multiple
implications, potentials and conditions—whether these are considered
fruitful or problematic, amiable or detestable, healthy or contagious.
“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”
(Deleuze 1990, p. 4).
The aim of the book is thus double. It is both to provide a general
philosophical conceptualization of ambient sound and its onto-aesthetic
implications and to distinguish its various cultural-historical manifesta-
tions, developments and sociocultural implications. My ambitions are
philosophical and aesthetic in the sense that I want to investigate the
basic notion of what it means to be and feel surrounded by sound, how
this surroundability is shaped by new strategies and technologies for
sonic production and listening, and what the deeper implications of this
development are for sonic philosophy, for sound studies, for listening and
22 U. Schmidt

auditory life, and for our conceptions of sound, materiality, technology

and the sonic environment.
At the same time, and in direct dialog with the philosophical analysis
and conceptualization, I wish to identify central events and historical
changes that can help to illuminate the complex influences of ambient
sound on art, music, film and sonic media, on central developments in
sound technology, and on everyday practices with sound and listening in
modern culture. I hope thereby to demonstrate and clarify how the mate-
rial and onto-aesthetic development of modern auditory culture in many
respects can be seen as a development toward an increasingly more ambi-
ent culture. In most part, my historical analysis is informed by a conven-
tional and probably quite unsurprising selection of material; it
undoubtedly includes some of the most well-known, well-described,
widespread and influential phenomena in the history of Western music,
sound art and auditory culture. The aim, in other words, is not to dig out
the forgotten niches and individual particularities of ambient innovation
in the history of art, music and technology. By contrast, by examining
some of the most widespread, defining and influential parts of its history,
I wish to substantiate ambient sound’s deep and pervasive influence on
modern auditory culture on a general scale. Hence, the role and influence
I wish to elucidate of ambient sound as a dominant cultural factor is
simultaneously a critical-aesthetic exploration of sound design as an over-
arching paradigm in auditory culture, of generalized pop as ambient
sound, of sonic mediatization and pervasive ‘synthetic sensibilities’ in
auditory culture, and of the ‘spectacular’ everyday aestheticization of lis-
tening, advanced by commercial industries and technological innovation.
The general onto-aesthetic shaping of culture, sensibility and subjectivity
may often start in the avantgarde and the singular, individual experiment,
but it works its deepest influence in and through the mainstream.
The book is structured in three parts. Part I, ‘Fields’ (Chaps. 2, 3, and
4), provides an analysis of the basic morphological and material charac-
teristics of ambient sound. It starts out, in Chap. 2, by exploring the
proto-ambient principle of unobtrusiveness in Erik Satie’s musique
d’ameublement, Heidegger’s notion of being-in and effects of aesthetic
centralization as key aspects of ambient sound. Chapters 3 and 4 investi-
gate in more detail how sound can expose its inherent ambient properties
 1 Introduction 23

and intensify sensations of being surrounded through basic morphologi-

cal principles such as objectivity, objectlessness, consistency, ubiquity,
immanence and a-figurative field effects. Finally, I argue that ambient
sound and music—beyond established genre conventions, cultural
spheres and historical periods—are characterized by a simple morpho-­
material principle expressed in the dynamic combination of repetition
and continuity.
In Part II, ‘Strategies’ (Chaps. 5, 6, and 7), I explore the techno-­
material conditions and onto-aesthetic strategies that guide the produc-
tion of ambient sound in art and culture. Central to the argument is the
concept of sonic mediatization, introduced in Chap. 5. In general terms,
sonic mediatization designates the morphological and material adaption
of an event to the medium in which it unfolds. In Chaps. 6 and 7, I sub-
sequently analyze and demonstrate how mediatization comprises an aes-
thetic ideal and leading design principle for the material production of
sound in avantgarde music, popular music and film sound since 1945.
This principle is, among other things, connected to a general shift in
sensibility from a reproduction aesthetics to a ‘production aesthetics’ cen-
tered around synthetic strategies for the material merging of sound,
medium and environment into a groundless total field of surround-
ing sound.
In Part III, ‘Frames,’ I analyze how ambient strategies and ideals have
shaped the spatio-material design and aestheticized use of listening tech-
nologies in modern auditory culture. In Chap. 8, I argue that listening
technologies are basically characterized by a complex double mediality
between directional and surroundable techniques, which potentially
engage listeners in sensations of simultaneously being-in a mediatized,
interior immanence and being-connected to an extra-medial environ-
ment through transmission of sonic energy and information from the
outside. In Chaps. 9, 10, and 11, I explore the ambient aspect of this
double mediality in more detail by focusing on three key areas for the
techno-material staging of listening: architectures for the acoustic pro-
duction of ambient environments (Chap. 9); amplified environments of
surroundability in music, art and cinema from mono to digital surrounds
(Chap. 10); and the current environments of everyday ambient listening
in headphones and infrastructures of sonic streaming (Chap. 11).
24 U. Schmidt

Notes
1. Sloterdijk (2004, p. 521); my translation from German of “Modernität,
das heisst: Auch der Hintergrund wird Produkt.”
2. For example, the experience-oriented economic perspective that still suf-
fuses today’s cultural industries is, as B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore
argued in their influential book from 1999, in large part distinguished
by the commercial tendency to think and stage its products as an “envi-
ronmental relationship” (Pine and Gilmore 1999, p. 31). “No wonder,”
they noted, “so many companies today wrap experiences around their
existing goods and services to differentiate their offerings. […] They can
enhance the environment in which clients purchase and / or receive the
service, layer on inviting sensations encountered while in that company-­
controlled environment, and otherwise figure out how to better engage
clients to turn the service into a memorable event” (ibid., p. 15). Taking
another approach, Yves Citton has more recently argued how contempo-
rary societies have moved from attention economy to a broader and
more affectively complex “ecology of attention.” The current “ecosys-
tem,” in which media, communication, entertainment and commerce
take place and blend, Citton argues, “functions as an echo chamber,
whose reverberations ‘occupy’ our minds (in the military sense of the
term): most of the time, we think (in our ‘heart of hearts’) only what is
made to resonate in us in the media vault by the echoes with which it
surrounds us. In other words, media enthralments create an
ECHOSYSTEM, understood as an infrastructure of resonances condition-
ing our attention to what circulates around, through and within us” (Citton
2017, p. 29).
3. For an analysis of the basic, yet contradictory, habituation demanded
and nurtured by contemporary media between the new and the same,
the exciting and the boring, control and addiction, see Chun (2016). For
a discussion of media as elemental habitats, see Peters (2015). As Peters
argues: “In the life sciences, ‘media’ already means gels and other sub-
stances for growing cultures, a usage growing from the older environ-
mental meaning of medium, and in a similar spirit we can regard media
as enabling environments that provide habitats for diverse forms of life,
including other media. […] We are back to the age-old […] communi-
cation environment in which media have become equipment for living
in a more fundamental way” (2015, p. 3–5).
 1 Introduction 25

4. According to John Durham Peters, the idea “that media are message-­
bearing institutions such as newspapers, radio, television, and the
Internet is relatively recent in intellectual history. […] The elemental
legacy of the media concept is fully relevant in a time when our most
pervasive surrounding environment is technological and nature […] is
drenched with human manipulation. In a time when it is impossible to
say whether the nitrogen cycle or the Internet is more crucial to the
planet’s maintenance, I believe we can learn much from a judicious syn-
thesis, difficult though it be, of media understood as both natural and
cultural. If media are vehicles that carry and communicate meaning,
then media theory needs to take nature, the background to all possible
meaning, seriously” (Peters 2015, p. 2).
5. As Casey O’Callaghan argues, “sounds are distal events in which a
medium is disturbed or set into motion by the activities of a body or
interacting bodies” (O’Callaghan 2017, p. 3). And later: “Sounds are
public occurrences in which a moving object or interacting bodies dis-
turb a surrounding medium” (ibid., p. 8). While I am in general agree-
ment with O’Callaghan in his realist (and implicitly ecological)
understanding of sound as distal mediatic disturbance, his general phi-
losophy of sound, however, is arguably somewhat weakened by the igno-
rance of (the use of ) technology and the mediatic complexity it brings
forth. By contrast, Brian Kane (2014), discussing the ideas of Pierre
Schaeffer, also argues for an understanding of sound as an evental rela-
tionship between cause, source, effect and medium, but he does so pre-
cisely to stress the complex role of technology in mediating, and
potentially disturbing, this very relationship. As we shall see, the ‘eco-
logical’ relations between a sound’s cause, source and effect are, in a
media-ecological perspective, always also potentially synthetic, phantas-
magoric and deceptive, and artificial operability and manipulability is
part of its nature. In other words, all aspects of a sound—cause, source,
effect, medium—are ‘effects’ and can be deployed and manipulated as
such to control the affective potentials of sound. Following Mack
Hagood, we can thus distinguish three different sonic potentials: “(1)
sound is mediated as mechanical waves in an environmental medium,
such as the air; (2) sound can also be mediated and altered as a signal
through electroacoustic and digital processes of transduction and signal
processing; and (3) sound is also mediatic in itself, a sensory-spatial pro-
cess of interaction though which subjects and objects emerge in modes
26 U. Schmidt

of affective relation. Through the first potential, subjects and objects

make sound. Through the third potential, sound makes subjects and
objects. Using technologies we call electronic media, subjects leverage
the second potential of signal processing as they attempt to control the
modes of affectivity enacted through the first and third potentials”
(Hagood 2019, p. 27).
6. I introduce the term matter-medium, a concept I will develop further
throughout the book, in order to stress the coupling of the elemental
materiality of environmental mediums and the mediatic environmental-
ity of elemental matter. The elemental dimension of matter-medium
indicates the flexible, dynamic properties of environmental mediums. It
is in this respect somewhat similar to what Deleuze and Guattari call the
‘molecular’ (versus the stable, rigid properties of the ‘molar’) (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987). The elemental and molecular, of course, do not
designate any ‘naturalness’ of media. Rather, it refers to a state of granu-
lar dynamics and flexibility in a world in which “any distinction between
nature and technology is becoming blurred.” (Deleuze 1995, p. 155). As
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Tacker argue, following Deleuze, the
ambient and environmental aspects of contemporary networked media
technologies and informational protocols are in part a direct result of
their basic elemental nature. “The elemental,” they write, “is this ambi-
ent aspect of networks, the environmental aspect—all the things that we
as individuated human subjects or groups do not directly control or
manipulate. The elemental is not ‘the natural’, however (a concept that
we do not understand). The elemental concerns the variables and vari-
ability of scaling, from the micro level to the macro, the ways in which a
network phenomenon can suddenly contract, with the most local action
becoming a global pattern, and vice versa. The elemental requires us to
elaborate an entire climatology of thought” (Galloway and Thacker
2007, p. 157). For a more elaborate analysis of space as elemental matter,
see also Schmidt (2017).
7. Spitzer (1942a, p. 2). To be more exact, ambire was used as a translation
of the Greek verb periēchein, which means to ‘contain’ or ‘go around’
(peri ~ around + ēchein ~ to hold; the latter, ēchein, also being the root
of the word ‘echo’). Periēchon—a word that was never continued directly
in other languages—was a central concept in antique philosophy, first of
all in Aristotle’s cosmology where it referred to the cosmic all-­
encompassing space, and to surrounding space more generally.
 1 Introduction 27

8. Spitzer (1942a, b). In the later history of the concept of the ambient,
Spitzer notes, “this word cannot be separated from that of medium =
milieu” (Spitzer 1942a, p. 2). As an example, Spitzer describes how Isaac
Newton’s concept ‘ambient medium’ was translated into French as milieu
ambient (ibid., p. 1). He later concludes that ambiens and medium “have
come to have a strange and indissolvable relationship: indissolvable
purely, yet never constant or restful. They have met from time to time
(even in Greek the περιέχον [periēchon] was the μέσον [méson ~ middle,
medium] of perception), perhaps just to touch each other, and as if elec-
trified by this contact, each starts anew in a direction of its own” (Spitzer
1942b, p. 199).
9. To highlight just a few prominent examples, we can consider the implicit,
partial blurring of the terms environmental, ambient, ambience and atmo-
sphere in Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature (2007); for instance
in his description of the book’s key term “ambient poetics” as “a way of
conjuring up a sense of a surrounding atmosphere or world” (Morton
2007, p. 22). A more direct and explicit equation of ‘atmosphere’ and
‘ambience’ in environmental aesthetics is found in Yuriko Saito’s Everyday
Aesthetics (2007). And as an example of a consistent translation of the
French ambiance into the English ‘atmosphere’ in a key philosophical
text, see Jean Baudrillard’s Le système des objets (1968) and The System of
Objects (1996). For an extended discussion of the distinctions between
ambient, ambience and atmosphere in relation to sound, see Lacey
(2022, p. 87–96). And for a discussion of the same conceptual distinc-
tion in relation to aesthetic culture in general, see McCormack (2018,
p. 140, 223n).
10. Sterne (2013); Guillebaud (2017, p. 3). Schafer’s work has been widely
criticized beyond the scope of my present argument. For example, Sterne
(2003) and several others have drawn attention to Schafer’s contempt of
technological reproduction because it, according to Schafer, promotes a
state of ‘schizophonia’, and to his anti-modern preference for acoustic
hi-fi sounds (conceptualized, at least in part, with a wittingly intended
­contradiction in terms). Schafer has also been criticized for promoting a
bias towards special types of soundscapes observable in, for instance, his
“personal aversion to urbanism” (Toop 2004, p. 62), or in what Dylan
Robinson describes as a latent racism and cultural appropriation in
Schafer’s work (Robinson 2020, p. 1). In addition, mainly because of
soundscape’s connotations to visuality, flatness and distance, Guillebaud
28 U. Schmidt

proposes a distinction between soundscape and sonic “ambiance/milieu/

Umwelt” (Guillebaud 2017, p. 3–5). Although my perspective and aims
are more philosophical and aesthetic compared to Guillebaud’s ethno-
graphic approach, I will maintain a similar distinction between sound-
scape and ambient sound. Although soundscape was indeed intended by
Schafer as a broad concept for the sonic environment in all its aspects,
and despite the fact that “the term is everywhere in sound studies”
(Sterne 2013, p. 181), I prefer for the most part to use and develop other
concepts in order to avoid the ambiguities and undesirable connotations
surrounding the term.
11. As Schafer suggests: “What the soundscape analyst must do first is to
discover the significant features of the soundscape, those sounds which
are important either because of their individuality, their numerousness
or their domination” (Schafer 1994, p. 9).
12. According to Jürgen Hasse, atmospheres are perceived “as an affective
tone of a place. [...] They communicate something about the distinct
qualities of a place in a perceptible manner, they tune us to its rhythm”
and “let us comprehend without words how something is around us.
Therefore, atmospheres are also indicators of social situations” (Hasse
2014, p. 215).
13. I have explored and developed this understanding of sonic atmosphere
in more detail in Schmidt (2019).
14. For an excellent comparative analysis of the environment in Uexküll,
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze/Guattari, see Buchanan (2008).
Gibson summarizes his idea of environmental perception as something
which takes place in, and is in part conditioned by, a surrounding mate-
rial medium in Gibson (1986, p. 16–19).
15. As Uexküll writes, “the space peculiar to each animal, wherever that ani-
mal may be, can be compared to a soap-bubble which completely sur-
rounds the creature at a greater or less distance. The soap-bubble of the
extended constitutes for the animal the limit of what for it is finite, and
therewith the limit of its world; what lies behind that is hidden in infin-
ity” (Uexküll 1926, p. 42). See also Uexküll (2010, p. 69–70), where
Uexküll further expands upon the soap bubble image. Interestingly,
Susanne K. Langer later translates Uexküll’s Umwelt into “ambient”
(Langer 1967, p. 282–284). Langer’s notion of Umwelt as ambient
denotes, in Eldritch Priest’s words, “a monadic surround or vital territory
 1 Introduction 29

defined by the way an organism’s activities filter out deleterious or irrel-

evant influences” (Priest 2013, p. 50n).
16. Spitzer (1942b, p. 194). With the biological and sociological notions of
the milieu/environment in the nineteenth century by Comte, Taine and
others, Spitzer argues, the “‘surrounding element’” becomes “that which
environs, not an inert substance, as in physics, but a living being; milieu
ambiant represents the element in which an organism lives and upon
which it depends for sustenance” (ibid., p. 175). And as he later con-
cludes: “Also important, however, is the new emphasis on the mi of
milieu: this now reflects a subjective attitude of being ‘in the midst of,
surrounded by’ […]. What was once itself ‘in the middle,’ ‘a middle
place,’ now becomes a place in-­the-­middle-of-which one is! After all its
various cycles [middle place → intermediate point → place → ‘golden
means’ → medium of communication → element considered as a factor
→ surrounding element → environment considered as a factor → the
place surrounding us, in the middle of which we are], the word has come
again to have a ‘middle’ meaning. The circle is completed” (ibid.,
p. 193–194).
17. To accentuate a few examples: Douglas Kahn notes how sound “is not
only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener,
and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This
mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among pres-
ences. […] Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and
behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity
can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the
frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corpore-
ality and spatiality” (Kahn 1999, p. 27). And in a similar vein, Karen
Collins describes how sound’s enveloping capacities have been used “to
refer to the sense of sonic spaciousness, the subjective immersion of the
listener, the fullness of sound images around a listener, the sense of being
enveloped by reverberant sound, and the sense of being surrounded by
sound. I define envelopment as the sensation of being surrounded by
sound or the feeling of being inside a physical space (enveloped by that
sound)” (Collins 2013, p. 54). For a further discussion of the historical
conception of sound as inherently spatial due to its vibratory, propaga-
tive and reflective nature, see Gascia Ouzounian (2020, p. 3–7).
18. Sterne (2003, p. 15). I will return to Sterne’s audiovisual litany in more
detail later and discuss its implications for the notion of ambient sound.
30 U. Schmidt

19. Yet, since evolution has in part predisposed humans to frontal vision (in
contrast, for example, to animals with omnidirectional vision like deer,
horses and rabbits), visual physiologists have, according to Gibson,
mainly studied the act of looking-at and tended to overlook acts of
looking-­around. This, Gibson argues, is in part due to habits of cultural
practice since “we modern, civilized, indoors adults are so accustomed to
looking at a page or a picture, or through a window, that we often lose
the feeling of being surrounded by the environment, our sense of the
ambient array of light” (Gibson 1986, p. 203). This claim, however, is
arguably challenged, and quite distinctly so, by historical developments
in modern urbanized and mediatized culture (Schmidt 2013; Crary
1990, 2001, 2013).
20. Directionality and surroundability are not only noetic acts of the inten-
tional mind, to use the phenomenological vocabulary Ihde adopts from
Husserl, but possess a noematic correlate in the phenomenal world:
“Both these dimensional aspects of auditory presence [directionality and
surroundability] are constant and copresent, but the intentional focus
and the situation varies the ratio of what may stand out. There is also a
noematic difference in relation to what kind of sound may most clearly
present itself as primarily surrounding and primarily directional without
losing its counterpart” (Ihde 2007, p. 77–78).
21. The term ‘onto-aesthetics,’ it should be noted, is not originally coined by
Kane (as he claims, taking inspiration from Nelson Goodman). It is a
term that is applied widely by Deleuze scholars and in Deleuzian inspired
scholarship—along with similar terms such as ‘onto-ethics,’ ‘onto-­
epistemology’ and ‘onto-ethology’ (Alliez 2004; Zepke 2005; Buchanan
2008; Hetrick 2019)—to emphasize the aesthetic potentials implied in
Deleuze’s realist, materialist, non-subjective, non-representational, and
in some respects anti-phenomenological, philosophy.
22. For Deleuze, sensation and the sensible is not a capacity of the sensing
subject, but something which transcends it as a potential (onto-aesthetic)
‘effect’, embedded in the empirical fabric of worldly being: “It is strange
that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded on what
can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not
much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible
from ­representation and to determine it as that which remains once rep-
resentation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody
of sensations). Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics
 1 Introduction 31

an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible

that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference,
potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qual-
itative diversity. It is in difference that movement is produced as an
‘effect,’ that phenomena flash their meaning like signs” (Deleuze 1994,
p. 56–57).
23. Ambient sound, and the tension between directionality and surround-
ability, is thus arguably a central part of the general historical develop-
ment of modern Western culture, which includes key issues related to
the onto-aesthetic management and regulation of attention. For instance,
as Jonathan Crary argues, since the nineteenth century “Western moder-
nity has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms
of a capacity for ‘paying attention,’ that is, for a disengagement from a
broader field of attraction, whether visual or auditory, for the sake of
isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli. That our lives are
so thoroughly a patchwork of such disconnected states is not a ‘natural’
condition but rather the product of a dense and powerful remaking of
human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years. Nor is it insignifi-
cant now at the end of the twentieth century that one of the ways an
immense social crisis of subjective dis-integration is metaphorically diag-
nosed is as a deficiency of ‘attention’” (Crary 2001, p. 1).

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Another random document with
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dread of what his demon-wife might take it into her head to do now
she was foiled in her cherished ambition for her child. He had
brought a beautiful basket of roses for Mrs. Lauriston, and he
insisted on paying for their tickets himself, to save poor Nouna what
he thought might be the shock of travelling second-class. When, as
the train started, Nouna saw that, on shaking hands with her
husband, the Colonel’s eyes grew moist and kindly, she relented,
and leaning far out of the carriage window, bestowed upon her
amazed and unwilling father a kiss which, being justified only by that
relationship which he was trying so hard to conceal, was scarcely
less unwelcome than a charge of grapeshot.
The train was out of sight before he recovered a degree of
serenity, which was shaken immediately afterwards by a glimpse he
caught, as he was leaving the station, of a tall, lean man wearing a
red fez, who came out by a different door, and crossing the inclosure
in front with quick strides, was lost to his sight among the crowd in
the Strand. Although George had not informed him of all he feared
from Rahas, he had told him enough about this dark-skinned agent
of Chloris White’s to make the Colonel suspect that with all their care
they had not succeeded in evading her evil vigilance. At first he
thought he would warn George, but reflecting how common foreign
headgear of all sorts is in London, he decided that he had not
enough grounds for disturbing so soon the poor fellow’s sense of
security.
With their arrival in Paris began the third era in the married life of
George and his wife. Nouna’s delight in the bright city was so great
that at first the fact of having to live in two small rooms on the fourth
floor of a house in a narrow street off the Boulevard Poissonnière
was of no account compared with the knowledge of the pleasures
that lay outside, the walks along the lighted boulevards in the
evening before the shops were shut, the expeditions in a tramcar to
the Bois de Boulogne or Saint Cloud, above all the Sunday trips
upon the Seine on a steamer, all joys within the reach of a most
modest purse, were delirious excitements to her susceptible
temperament, in the first ecstasy of which the handsome house at
Kensington, the tropical plants, the supper parties, even the services
of her servant Sundran, were for the time forgotten. On one
memorable Sunday they indulged in a drive round the Bois in a
fiacre, and in ices at the little châlet restaurant opposite the cascade,
where the lower middle-class brides come in all their bravery of white
satin and long veil and orange-blossom wreath, looking coquettish,
happy, and at ease in the unaccustomed attire which an English girl
of the same class wears with such shamefaced awkwardness. To
Nouna that day gave a glimpse of Paradise: the fiacre was more
comfortable than her victoria in London had been, Hyde Park could
not compare with the Bois, the passers-by amused, the ice
intoxicated her. When the sunshine had faded into twilight, and they
had driven back home through the lighted streets, she climbed up
the long flights of stairs, still in a silent ecstasy, and sat down in a
little low chair George had bought for her, seeing nothing in the
gloom but moving carriages, and small trees growing thickly round a
lake that glittered in sunshine, and pretty mock châlets and a
ridiculous little waterfall that fell from nothing into nowhere.
Presently she got up and went out on to the broad balcony which,
encroaching upon the size of the rooms, was yet the chief charm of
this little home under the roof. She had hung one corner of it with
curtains, and George had contrived a canvas awning under which,
when the weather was fine, she spent most of the hours of his
absence. Her husband watched without following her as she leaned
upon the rail and looked out at the yellow glow in the west which
could still be seen behind the housetops. Suddenly she turned and
came back to him. Standing just within the window with her back to
the fading light, her face could not be seen; but her voice rang out
with a strange vibration as she called to him, holding her arms
towards him:
“George, why don’t you come out to me?”
He was with her in a moment, found her trembling and dry-lipped,
and tried to persuade her to lie down while he called to the old
woman from whom they rented the rooms, to prepare their supper.
But Nouna shook her head, and insisted on his remaining with her by
the window. Yes, she was tired, she admitted, but she wanted the air;
she would go out on the balcony again if he would go with her. As
she seemed to desire it, he let her lead him out, all the time keeping
her eyes fixed in a remarkable manner immovably on his face.
 “Look out,” she said, “at the sky—at the houses—at all you can
see.”
He let his gaze pass obediently from her face to the pale-starred
sky, the grey-blue of which was merging into the last red rays of the
disappearing sunset: to the house-roofs and chimney-pots, of which
they had a good though not an extensive view, to the street below,
with its little globes of yellow light, and the dark specks which were
all he could see of the moving passengers. Then he turned to her
curiously.
“Well, little one, I have looked at everything.”
“And you see nothing—nothing strange at all?”
“There’s a tabby cat two roofs off,” said the prosaic male
doubtfully.
“No, no,” she interrupted impatiently, still without moving her eyes
from his face. “Down below us—on the opposite side—a little to the
left—in the black shade.” Her voice had sunk gradually into a
whisper. Then she stopped.
“Well, I see nothing.”
“Not at the house where they have a floor shut up?”
George stepped forward and leaned over the rail of the balcony as
she had done, Nouna following closely and clinging to his hand. On
the opposite side, about three doors down, there was a flat on the
third floor which had borne during the first days of their residence in
Paris a large board inscribed ‘A louer.’ George saw that the board
was gone, and that one of the shutters was thrown back.
“Oh, I see they’ve let it. Well, there’s nothing to be frightened
about in that, my child.”
“You don’t notice anything else—anything strange—you don’t see
any—person?”
George started, and looked down again with searching eagerness
along the line of dead-eyed shuttered windows.
“No, child, there is nobody.”
Nouna heaved a long sigh, and looked timidly down through her
husband’s arm.
“No, it’s—gone,” she whispered.
“What is gone, dear? Tell me what you saw,” said George
caressingly, as he drew her back into the little sitting-room, where a
lamp now shed its soft light over the white table-cloth, and Madame
Barbier, who adored the picturesque young English couple, was
arranging the supper in a dainty and appetising fashion.
Nouna rubbed her eyes, and clinging to her husband’s arm, let the
words of her recital drop from her lips in a slow, hesitating and
faltering manner, as if she were fast asleep, and her brain were
working sluggishly under the half-paralysing influence of a will
stronger than her own.
“I was sitting in here,” she said, “and thinking of all the happiness
we have had to-day—the soft air and the warm sun, and your kind
eyes upon me, and all the lovely things we saw—the beautiful ladies
and the shining water, and the lights among the trees in the Champ
Elysées when we came back. And all at once,” her hands tightened
their hold upon his sleeve, “I felt that I must get up and go out—there
upon the balcony; and I looked out at the sky right in front where it
was yellow like flame, and all the pretty pictures of the day I saw
quite plainly still in my mind. But then—I don’t know how—I felt my
eyes drawn down from the bright sky, and there down below me—to
the left, I saw all black gloom, and in it I seemed to see Rahas’ room
in Mary Street, with all the pretty toys and bright shawls about just as
he used to put them for me to look at. And in the middle Rahas
himself, only not kind and gentle as he used to be, but with a wicked
cruel face, and burning eyes that frightened me. And I felt afraid, as
if I could have screamed. It seemed so strange, for even when he
used to look fierce, as he did sometimes, I never minded, and I was
never frightened. Was it a dream, George, that I saw? And if it was
only a dream, why was I afraid?”
Chiming in so appropriately with his own fears, this vision or fancy
of Nouna’s disturbed George a little. He calmed her excitement as
well as he could, and found some comfort in the fact that the crafty
Oriental had appeared to her, not as the kindly friend he had always
professed to be, but as a person inspiring horror. This seemed the
more remarkable as George had never mentioned the name of
Rahas to his wife since their wedding-day; he came, after a little
reflection, to look upon the vision as a proof of the new sympathy
which Nouna began to show with his own feelings, and to rejoice in
the fact that as the bond between him and his wife grew stronger
under the influence of his patient tenderness, the power of any
enemy to disturb their happiness was proportionately lessened. This
home peace, which was attaching Lauriston to his young wife more
strongly every day, was the more grateful to him, as his duties at the
Bank were rendered as irksome as possible to him through the
prejudice of his chief, Mr. Gurton, who never forgave the rejection of
his own candidate for the junior clerk’s post, and who scarcely
concealed his wish to find against him some lawful ground of
dissatisfaction. This George was careful not to give.
Mr. Gurton was one of those disagreeable brutes who seem to be
created as foils to show up the amiability and sweetness of ordinary
humanity. He was offensive to his few friends; he was unendurable
to the far greater number of people whom nothing but necessity
threw in his way. But as a man of business he was clear-headed,
shrewd, and enterprising, so exact and penetrating that even if he
drank, as his many detractors alleged, there seemed to be no
particular reason why he should not, as his business faculties could
not be said to be less keen at one time than at another. He hated
Lauriston from the first, bullied him on the smallest or on no
occasion, and did all in his power to induce the young fellow to throw
up his appointment. George took soft words and sour with dogged
quietness, and applied himself with all the energy of his character to
mastering every detail connected with his new profession, as
serenely as if incivility had been his daily bread for years. As a
matter of fact, the discourtesy and fault-finding of his chief did not
trouble him much; he looked upon Gurton, not without reason, as an
ill-bred brute whom one could only turn to account by noting the
methods by which he had attained such a splendid dexterity in the
management of affairs, and by thus considering him in the light of a
noisy machine it was easy to take the sting out of his insults. At the
same time this constant friction or avoidance of friction in his
business life made home and wife doubly dear and sweet to him.
On the day following Nouna’s strange vision on the balcony, he
came home at the usual time, and asked her whether she had had
any more “waking dreams.” She answered, reluctantly and shyly,
that she had not been on the balcony at all that day. George laughed
at her, and told her she should go with him, as the presence of such
a coarse creature as a man was a sure preventive of visions. She
allowed him to lead her out, being quite brave with the combined
forces of husband and sunlight. When they got on the balcony,
however, and looked to the left at the house where Nouna had
fancied she saw Rahas, a sight met their eyes which, whether a
coincidence or not, was strange enough to deepen the unpleasant
impression of the evening before.
For the shutters of the uninhabited third floor were now thrown
back, and outside the balcony hung a long strip of white calico with
this inscription in broad blue letters: “Bazar Oriental.”
George and Nouna read the words, and looked at each other in
troubled amazement.
“I’ll have this cleared up to-night,” thought George to himself.
 CHAPTER XXVI.
When, true to his determination, George Lauriston visited the new
establishment that evening and insisted on seeing the proprietor, an
explanation offered itself which robbed Nouna’s vision of most of the
mystery attaching to it. For a dapper little Frenchman, who tried to
live up to his obviously assumed business title of Ben Hassan by
wearing a scarlet fez and a pair of Turkish slippers, immediately
appeared behind the servant who opened the door, and announcing
himself with a flourishing bow as the proprietor, thrust into
Lauriston’s hand a business card, and begged him to inspect his
stock, adding that perhaps Monsieur would do him the honour to
inaugurate his business and bring him good luck by purchasing
some trifle. George consented. The Oriental bazaar consisted of
three rooms fitted up with trestles on which were placed trays full of
trumpery, gilt sequin necklaces, cheap scarves, and other so-called
Eastern wares, such as may be bought for a very small sum in the
smaller shops along the Rue de Rivoli. George bought a little feather
hand-screen, obviously an “article de Paris,” and returned to his wife
quite satisfied that it was the sight of Monsieur Ben Hassan’s red fez
at one of the windows which had conjured up in her excited
imagination the ground-floor in Mary Street and its younger
occupant.
In order to convince his wife of her mistake, George took her next
day to the establishment of Monsieur Ben Hassan, and was pleased
to find that the nervous fear which had haunted her since her
supposed vision faded away in the amusement of turning over the
cheap trinkets and toys around her, as the obsequious proprietor, an
active and voluble little Parisian, who would have been invaluable as
a showman at a country fair, encouraged her to do. George asked
him, to satisfy Nouna, whether he had not had a friend with him on
the balcony two evenings before, a foreign gentleman, in whom, he
said, he thought he recognised an old acquaintance. Ben Hassan
said No, he had been working by himself to prepare his “Bazaar” for
opening on the following day, and he had been alone except for the
occasional assistance of the servant. He admitted also, with a
charmingly candid shrug of the shoulders, that his name of Ben
Hassan was assumed, that in private life he was simply Jules
Dubois, and that there was no gentleman in the business who came
from further East than the Faubourg Saint Antoine.
Nouna, to tell the truth, hardly listened to this explanation. She
was at heart still so much a child as to find, in trying on Tunisian
earrings at a franc and a half a pair, and gold crescent brooches that
could not be warranted to retain their colour a second time of
wearing, as much pleasure as she had felt, a few weeks back, in
decking herself with her wedding diamonds. Noticing this, the artful
Ben Hassan informed the lady that he expected, in the course of a
few days, a consignment of Indian jewellery which would be well
worthy of Madame’s attention, as it was the most marvellously cheap
and beautiful assortment that had ever been seen in France.
Nouna’s face glowed with interest, which was repressed for the
moment by her husband, who said coldly that Madame did not wear
imitation jewellery; a statement which seemed calculated to be
received with doubt, as Madame, now hung from head to foot with
gilt chains and spangled handkerchiefs, was evidently very well
satisfied with herself. However, the tactful Parisian bowed low and
apologised, humbly observing that the wares in question were
continually mounted, by desire of well-known ladies of the Boulevard
Saint Germains, with real gems of the highest value. Nouna divested
herself of the trinkets with manifest regret, and was with difficulty
persuaded by her husband to buy a string of sandalwood beads
instead of the barbaric rows of eye-dazzling brass on which her
choice had first fallen. George was rather shocked; a taste for cheap
finery in his wife seemed quite a new and startling development. As
soon as they got on the stairs outside he said, in a low and puzzled
voice:
“You wouldn’t really care to have those gimcrack things, would
you, Nouna?”
She wanted to sit down on the stairs and take the paper off her
beads: stopping in the act, she looked up at him with a laugh, but yet
showing a gleam of serious meaning in her red-brown eyes.
 “Why not, if I can’t have real ones?” she said with a note of pathos
in her voice. “If I had rich things I should sell them to give you
money. But these poor ones I can keep and do you no harm.”
And George had a lump in his throat, as he often had now at
innocent speeches like this from his wife, which showed the
dawnings of a new womanly sympathy with him side by side with the
old childish love of finery and glitter.
She showed, by certain impulsive remarks in the course of the
next few days, a deep interest in the “marvellously cheap and
beautiful assortment of Indian jewellery,” of which the sham Arabian
had spoken; and when, towards the end of the week, Monsieur Ben
Hassan called one evening, not, as he assured the young
Englishman, with the intention of persuading him to buy the mock
gems which he had been informed Madame did not wear, but merely
to justify in the eyes of Monsieur the praises which he had lavished
on his own wares, Nouna showed so much eagerness to see them
that George had not the heart to deny her the pleasure. Ben Hassan
proceeded, by the light of the lamp which stood on the table amidst
the remnants of the dessert, to unfasten a little flat box which he
carried, to take out a layer of cotton-wool, and to display, against the
velvet lining, rows of flashing white gems which caused Nouna to cry
out with irrepressible admiration and longing.
“I flatter myself,” said the Parisian, laying the box on the table and
retreating a few paces with a bow, as if trusting his wares to speak
for themselves, “that there is not another firm in France which can
produce such a class of jewel for the same price.”
“Yes, yes,” said George hastily, with a shrewd guess that to see
these sparkling ornaments hidden away again in the little box and
carried off without leaving her so much as a single gem to remember
them by, would break Nouna’s heart. “But they are only sham jewels,
Monsieur Ben Hassan, and a lady who has had diamonds of her own
could not condescend to wear these.”
Nouna, who was leaning over the table, fingering the ornaments
delicately, and considering them with the intelligent interest of a
connoisseur, glanced up at her husband with a twinkle of demure
humour in her eyes, and instantly returned to her amusement with
condescension so infinite that it was not to be distinguished from the
most extravagant admiration. The astute Ben Hassan saw the look,
and bowed again with great humility.
“Monsieur, it is true an imitation is but a poor thing when you know
it is an imitation,” he said with shoulders raised and hands
outstretched in modest pleading. “But I appeal to Madame, who is
evidently a judge, if she would have known these stones from real
ones?”
Nouna hesitated, then quietly picked out a pair of diamond solitaire
earrings, and held them out under the lamp in her little pink palm.
“I should not have known these from real ones,” she said
doubtfully, and she looked up with an inquiring glance into the
Parisian’s face.
Ben Hassan drew himself up with much satisfaction.
“You hear, Monsieur,” he said proudly, “Madame would not have
known these earrings from real diamonds, and the cost of the pair is
only ten francs!”
“Ten francs!” echoed Nouna with incredulous delight.
And as she turned to her husband with a low murmur, “Oh,
George!” the paymaster saw that he was doomed. Without further
show of resistance he paid the ten francs, and signed to the bowing,
smirking Ben Hassan to pack up his traps and take himself off, which
the Parisian did, departing with a torrent of high-flown thanks for their
patronage and with every appearance of being highly satisfied with
the transaction. So contented did he seem indeed, that so soon as
the door closed behind him, and Nouna rushed into the bedroom to
try on her purchase, George instinctively took stock of all the
portable property which had been within the lively Ben Hassan’s
reach, to make sure that his ostensible occupation had not been a
cover for a predatory one. He had scarcely reassured himself on this
point when Nouna rushed in like a radiant little fire-fly, her new
ornaments twinkling in her ears, her eyes dancing with mysterious
excitement, her dress changed from a simple muslin to a ball-dress
of yellow gauzy material in honour of her brilliant bargain. She flitted
up to him almost breathlessly, and pulled his head down to her level
that she might whisper into his ear a communication which appeared
to be of vital importance.
 “Do you think,” she suggested solemnly, “that he could have made
a mistake, and that they are real?”
George laughed, and said No, he did not think it at all likely,
whereupon she was silent for a little while, and then began again in
the same tone, but with much hesitation.
“You know, George, he told me that day we went to his bazaar that
he had some real diamonds in his stock, and said that, that——”
“Well, that what?” asked her husband, keeping his voice at a
gently subdued pitch, with a intuitive feeling that a confession was
coming.
“That if I would call in—some day—by myself—he would show
them to me.”
“By yourself!” cried George, all his blood on fire in a moment.
Nouna seemed at once to become a mere terror-struck heap, and
her husband saw his fatal mistake.
“Did you go? Did you ever go?” he asked in the softest tones he
could produce. But for a few minutes she was too much frightened
even to speak, except for a muttered, “No, no, no,” as she shook and
shivered. When at last by patient gentleness he had mastered her
fear, he extracted from her, little by little, the avowal that she had met
Ben Hassan one day outside the door of the house where he lived
as she was returning home from her marketing, and that he had
persuaded her to go up stairs and see some diamonds he had just
received. At the door, however, Nouna declared that she had been
frightened by hearing another man’s voice inside, and had refused to
go in, and that Ben Hassan had brought out some earrings to show
her, and had declared that if she would like to take a pair he would
be satisfied with only a small payment to start with, and she could
pay off the rest in instalments at her convenience.
“But I was frightened, and would not, and I tossed his hand up with
the diamonds, and they fell on the floor and on the stairs, and I ran
down and left him, and have never seen him since until this
evening,” finished Nouna, hurrying to the end of her confession. “And
I know it was wrong to go up, but I didn’t go in. And now I have done
all I could by telling you everything. And you can take the earrings
back if you like, only don’t be angry with me, because I can’t bear it.”
 She burst out crying hysterically, and it was some time before she
was calm enough for her husband to be able to ask her one more
question. Did she know the voice of the man she heard talking inside
the bazaar? At first she professed she did not, but presently she
acknowledged, when asked whether it was like the voice of Rahas,
that she thought it was. Then George was very sweet to her, and
said she mustn’t trouble herself any more about the matter, that she
was a very good dear girl to tell him everything, and that it would
have been better still if she had told him at first; that she must give
up the earrings, as it was evident the man was a treacherous beast
who might get them into trouble. He added that she was tired, and
must go to bed, and fall asleep as fast as she could, and dream of
the real jewels she should have some day if she continued to be the
sweet and good little wife she now was. And so, amidst tears from
the wife and consoling kisses, the little shining ear-studs were taken
out, and George having become by this time a promising lady’s
maid, brushed out her curls for her, and tucked her up in bed, as
composedly as if nothing in the world had happened to disturb the
calm course of their daily life.
But no sooner was his wife thus disposed of than George, saying
he must write a letter and take it to the post, went out of the
bedroom, closed the door, and after waiting just long enough, as he
thought, to make Nouna think, if she was listening, that he had
written a letter, he went out and down the stairs. But Nouna had too
much native subtlety herself to be easily tricked. As soon as she
heard the outer door of the flat close, she leapt out of bed, muffled
herself up in a wrapper, and stepped out on to the balcony. She
could see that there were lights in the rooms occupied by the
Oriental Bazaar, and that the shadows of men passed and repassed
quickly on the inner side of the striped blinds. Leaning over the iron
railing, she watched in much excitement for her husband’s
appearance in the street below. In a very few minutes she heard the
wicket-gate in the porte cochére open, saw George cross the street,
and enter the house where Ben Hassan was established. She could
have cried out to him from where she stood, frozen by a great terror
lest these men, whom he had gone to punish, should be too strong
for him and should do him harm. But then, would they dare, would
they be able, even if they dared, to hurt him, the king of men? Little
by little the seed sown by patient kindness, by conscientious effort,
was moving in the earth and beginning to show itself alive. George
was not now merely the handsomest, straightest, gentlest of voice
among the men she knew, he was also the one person who never
did wrong, who if he was angry proved in the end to have what she
acknowledged to be a just cause at the bottom of his anger, whose
rather surprising notions of what one ought and ought not to do were
at least simple when one came to know him well; and whose opinion
was now beginning to have so much weight with her that this
evening it had even urged her in the strangest way to break through
her habits and make an uncomfortable confession of her own
accord. So she reasoned, arguing with herself as he crossed the
road whether or not she should try from the height of the fourth floor
to attract his attention. It would not be difficult, she felt. The influence
she was secure in possessing over him would make him stop and
look up at a call of her voice such as would scarcely be heard by the
neighbours in the adjoining flats. Suddenly she drew herself erect, a
thrill of passionate pride vibrating through her heart, and she laughed
aloud and stretched her little hands to the dark sky.
“He does not need my help, for he is one of God’s own sons,” she
whispered, and looking up steadily into the eye of night she waited,
with heart beating violently, but with head erect in valiant confidence.
He had to get up those long flights of stairs, but he would not be
long, she knew. She counted the steps he would take, picturing him
with grave, earnest face, wearing that look which, when she had
done something of which he disapproved, made her want to slide
along against the wall with her head turned away from him. The
entresol, first floor, second floor; surely by this time he must be at the
third. She clenched her fingers till the nails made red marks in her
soft palms, and strained her eyes in keen staring at the striped
blinds. The moving shadows behind them had disappeared. Ben
Hassan and Rahas—if it was he—had gone to the door when the
sharp ring came at the bell. Nouna held her breath. Surely, surely,
she heard sounds from the rooms; yes, yes, a noise of something
overturned, and then the lights were put out. The moment after, one
of the windows was burst open with a crash, and two people, whose
figures she could only see dimly in the darkness, sprang quickly, the
one after the other, out on to the balcony, climbed over on to that of
the next house, and disappeared through one of the windows. Then
there was silence for a time which seemed long to her, and she saw
a dim light reappear in the windows of the Oriental Bazaar. She
guessed that it was her husband, searching; in a few minutes the
light moved, and disappeared. She watched until she saw him
reappear in the street below, then she went back into her room, and
crept into bed again. When he came softly into the room, holding a
candle he had lit in the next room, he crept up to the bedside and
shaded the flame to look at her. As he did so, her face quivered, and
he touched her forehead lightly with his fingers. The muscles of her
mouth instinctively relaxed, and by the thrill that ran through her
frame and communicated itself to his he knew that she was awake.
“You are cold, dearest,” he whispered.
She sprang up, wide awake, full of life and love, with the bright
blood rushing up into her cheeks, and tender, passion-dark eyes.
“No, no, not now, not now,” she cried incoherently, as she threw
her arms about him. “I was cold when I thought you were going to
face those wicked men, all through my foolishness. But now you are
safe I am warm, warm, and listen, George, I am always going to be
good and tell you everything, so that you may never get into danger
through me any more.”
But George was frightened, for her feet were cold as marble, and
her lips hot and parched, and he sat up a long time beside her, afraid
lest her imprudence should have brought on a fever. Next morning
she insisted against his will on getting up. She did not feel well and
was very fanciful, astonishing him by the announcement that she
wanted to go to church. The day being Sunday, the Oriental Bazaar
was closed, and there was nothing for George to do but to gratify her
desire. He wished, as in duty bound, to take her to the English
church; but Nouna was not particular to a creed, and she had set her
heart on going to the Madeleine. So, with some scruples of
conscience, he took her to High Mass; and as she remained
perfectly quiet and attentive during the entire service, he comforted
himself with the reflection that, as what he had been taught to call
the “errors of Rome” were matters of the deepest ignorance and
indifference to her, it was hardly an ethical mistake to let her see
religion in an attractive light. When they came out he asked her
rather curiously what she thought of it.
“Oh, I liked it very, very much; I shouldn’t mind going to church
there every day,” she answered with enthusiasm.
“Why,” said George, “the service isn’t much more beautiful than
that at St. ——’s,” and he named an English ritualistic church to
which he had twice taken her in London.
“There is a difference,” she said thoughtfully.
“Well, what is it?”
Nouna considered a moment. “You know those friends of yours
that you took me to see acting in a piece at Saint George’s Hall?”
“Yes; well?”
“And then I saw the same piece acted at the Court Theatre just
before we left London?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the difference is just like that.”
George laughed. “I’ve heard people say something like that
before, Nouna.”
“Isn’t it right, then?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
“George, may I be a Roman Catholic if I like?”
“No, Nouna.”
“Why not?”
“You mustn’t choose a religion in a hurry, any more than you may
a husband. In both cases, one ought to be enough for a lifetime; and
if you once begin to change your mind about either, you never know
when to stop.”
“But I had my choice of a husband, and I didn’t of a religion; I had
to take what was given me.”
“You would never do for a Catholic, Nouna. They have to confess
all their sins, even very little ones that you think nothing of.”
“Well, that’s what you’re always wanting me to do.”
“See then. You shall go to Mass every Sunday and then confess
your sins to me, and you will be the very best of Catholics.”
“But, George, George,” she began, almost in a whisper, holding
his arm tighter, and looking away over the Place de la Concorde,
which they were now crossing, to the trees of the Tuileries, “there are
some things—not sins—that one doesn’t—like—to tell—I don’t know
why—but they make one think of so many things—that all seem new
—and make one feel—like a different person. I suppose a man—
never feels like that, but I’m a woman—quite a woman—now,
George.”
They walked on without speaking after that, till they got among the
trees; then both stopped and looked at each other—shy, for that little
whispered suggestion made each appear to the other in a new and
sanctified light. The influence of the solemn and impressive Church
rites was upon them still, and the bright sun was playing upon their
earnest faces through a moving trellis-work of leaves. They had
come to a moment which was to be the sweetest in all their lives but
one; a moment of perfect confidence, perfect happiness, perfect
hope. So they stood quite silently in an ecstasy of contented love,
each reading beautiful meanings in the other’s steadfast eyes, each
seeing and worshipping, in this moment of exalted human feeling,
what was best and most worshipful in the other. They felt so strong,
so radiant as they walked home, she leaning upon him and not
talking at all, that every evil which had been a burden yesterday and
would be a burden to-morrow, became a mere shadow slinking into
corners and dwindling into insignificance before the flood of sunshine
in their hearts. Chloris White, Rahas, Ben Hassan, and the odious
Gurton were mere names to George that day, and even when with
the following morning the drudgery and petty annoyances of
workaday life began again, he carried in his heart such a spring of
sweet human happiness that he received the snubs of his chief as
cheerfully as if they had been compliments, and bore with fortitude
the discovery that Monsieur Ben Hassan had “gone away for a few
days on business,” leaving his premises in the charge of a stolid boy
of thirteen or so, who knew nothing definite about his employer’s
movements. George therefore kept the earrings in his possession
and waited for some claim to be made. It came at the end of a week
in the shape of a bill for twelve hundred and fifty francs, ten of which
had been paid on account, for a pair of diamond ear-studs supplied
to Monsieur Lauriston. George sent back the ear-studs by registered
post with a letter threatening Ben Hassan with the police court. In a
few days he got back the ear-studs from the post-office, as the
person Ben Hassan was not to be found at the address given.
George took no further steps until he was summoned before the Civil
Tribunal, where he appeared in the full belief that he had only to
relate the facts of the case to confound Ben Hassan and lay him
open to the charge of perjury. To his great astonishment and
indignation, however, Ben Hassan solemnly swore that he had sold
the diamonds as real stones, and calling upon George to produce
them, challenged any one in the court to assert that it was possible
to suppose they could be bought for ten francs. Could the
Englishman’s wife assert that she did not know them to be real?
George had not dared to bring his wife into court, fearing the effects
of the excitement upon her. He weakened his case by asserting
emphatically that Ben Hassan was in the pay of a man who wished
to ruin him: for he had no proofs to bring forward, and the foreigner’s
halting French in which he made the accusation compared so
unfavourably with the torrent of eloquence with which the artful
Parisian refuted it, that, on Ben Hassan’s refusing to take back the
jewels, the magistrate ordered the Englishman to pay the amount
claimed, in monthly instalments of five hundred francs.
With the stolid resistance to unpleasant facts characteristic of his
nation, George treated this decision with utter contempt, and indeed
believed that Ben Hassan would not dare to push the case further.
But on arriving home one rainy day early in the following month, he
found his apartments occupied by two huissiers, who were busily
employed in dragging out into the hall poor Nouna’s trunks and such
furniture as they had bought themselves, which the landlady, anxious
to save her own things, was pointing out to them. Nouna, deathly
white and shaking from head to foot, was crouching on the sofa,
drawing her breath heavily, and watching them with bright and
burning eyes. Fear of what the consequences of this scene might be
to her sobered George in his first fierce outburst of indignation. She
had hardly moved when he came in, only glancing up at him in
shame and terror at what she knew to be the result of her own
indiscretion. He went up to the sofa and reassured her by the kind,
firm, protecting pressure of his hand upon her head, while he asked
the men by what authority they were acting. They showed him their
warrant; nothing could be more correct. He asked them whether they
would desist from their work and remain in the hall outside for half an
hour, while he went to a friend to try to raise the money. The men
consented at once, and retired while George, soothing his agitated
wife as well as he could, carried her into the next room, laid her on
the bed, and covering her with a rug, told her not to worry herself, as
it would be all right in half an hour, when he would be back again
with her, and the men would go away satisfied.
With his hand on the door he looked back yearningly. She was
quieter now, but as she leaned on her elbows and watched him with
feverish eyes, it seemed to him that her gaze was wandering and
unintelligent, and that the real matter-of-fact trouble which was
sending him on his unpleasant errand had melted in her excited
mind to a dim and horrible dread.
“George, don’t go, don’t go!” rang in his ears as he went down the
stairs and out of the house.
Poor George felt that he had never in his life had anything quite so
distasteful to do as the task he had before him now of asking a
favour of Mr. Gurton. But there was no help for it, and so he put the
best face he could upon the matter, got to the bank, where his chief
was, he knew, still at this hour to be found, and knocked at the door
of his private room.
“Come in,” called out the well-known husky voice.
Mr. Gurton was reading a letter. His face was flushed and his eyes
were dull, but he had as much command of himself as usual.
“Oh, it’s you, is it? What do you want?” he asked with the extra
shade of surliness which he used towards the people he did not like.
“Yes, sir,” said George. “I am sorry to disturb you after office hours,
but it is upon a matter of so much importance to me that I hope you
will excuse my coming to you.”
“Well, what is it? Be quick.”
The words, the appeal, stuck in the young man’s throat; but out
they must come.
“I am in pressing difficulties, sir; I can’t explain to you how now, but
it was through no fault of mine. Just now when I went home I found a
couple of men seizing my wife’s things. She is in a delicate state of
health, and I am afraid of the shock for her. Will you be so kind as to
advance me twenty pounds of my salary? I will write to my friends in
England to-night, and I shall have the money next week, and will
return it to you at once, if you please. It is a very difficult thing for me
to ask, but I hope you won’t refuse me.”
He hurried out the words, not daring to look at Mr. Gurton, who
had risen from his chair and walked over to the fireplace with a tread
which in its pompous heaviness told George before he looked up
that he had failed. There was a slight pause when he finished
speaking, Mr. Gurton rattling his watch-chain and clearing his throat.
George raised his eyes, and saw that his chief’s bloated face
expressed nothing but complacent satisfaction. Then the devil woke
in the lad with such a hungry fury that he turned hastily to the door,
afraid of himself. Mr. Gurton, unluckily, could not resist a little play
with his fish, and he called him back. George hesitated, and at last
turned slowly. Mr. Gurton paused again to find some particularly
offensive form of expression, for he thought he saw his opportunity,
by insulting the young fellow past endurance, to force him to resign
his post, and so make room for his own reputed nephew. He had
been put in possession, too, of a damaging fact against George, and
here was the occasion made to his hand, to use it.
“I’m sorry for this little misfortune, Lauriston, deuced sorry; not only
because it is quite beyond my powers to assist you, but because,
you see, it’s so particularly bad for a House that’s just starting, for
anything disreputable to be known about its employés.”
“Disreputable!” echoed George in a low voice, starting erect. “You
have no right to use such a word without knowing the facts, Mr.
Gurton.”
“Oh, I know all about the facts, and so does everybody,” said Mr.
Gurton with confidential familiarity. “You’ve got an extravagant little
madam for your wife, and somebody of course must pay the piper.”
George turned again to leave the room. Mr. Gurton, who was a
big, muscular man of six feet two, with two strides reached the door
first, admitted a lad with despatches who was waiting outside, and
held the door close as he continued:
“You must listen, sir, to what I have to say. You were received in
this House simply because we were informed that you were highly
connected, and that your social position would be an advantage to
the firm. What follows? You go nowhere, you know nobody; you are
seen in omnibuses, on penny steamers with a little oddly-dressed girl
—”
“Take care; you are speaking of my wife,” said George, in a low
tremulous voice which, with his bowed head, gave an utterly wrong
impression that he was cowed.
Mr. Gurton put his hands in his pockets.
“Well, sir, and if you choose to marry a courtesan’s daughter whom
you picked up in the slums—it is——”
Like a wild beast suddenly loosed George had him by the throat,
and with hands to which his mad anger gave a grip of steel, he
swayed the man’s huge frame once forward and flung him back with
all his force. Gasping, choking, without time to cry out, Mr. Gurton
staggered backwards, his head struck against the corner of an iron
safe that stood behind him, and he fell heavily to the floor. Lauriston
left the frightened errand-boy to pick him up, and rushed out of the
room. He had suddenly remembered that there was one more
chance; a fellow-clerk who was pretty well off lodged in the Rue
Saint Honoré. He made his way in that direction, through the still
heavily-falling rain, without another thought of the man he had just
left, except a savage wish that he had not humiliated himself by
applying to the cur.
But Mr. Gurton remained on the floor of his private room, and
neither spoke nor moved.