How to Swarm: Researching Sounds of Footballs Play

Margaret Meran Trail, 2010

Abstract
This paper considers how discussion of football sound is missing from critical discourse
and proposes ways to research it, in order to admit it. In it I attempt to communicate
both by explanation and by deploying particular, absorbing properties of anecdote,
conjecture, and playfulness. Absorption, in reading, sounding and play, is of particular
concern to this paper and I aim to involve my reader in this, as much as elaborating
ideas. I am concerned to find ways to understand that which has been poorly
servedcannot be conveyedby explanation alone, but must be felt in relation to
forces of play in order to yield (to understanding). This paper aims to open more
playing-space, the better to wrest more understanding.

Introduction
This article, about how to study the sounds of footballs play, draws upon
research that I undertook, completing a PhD by research in performance at
Victoria University, Melbourne (Trail, 2009). As research in performance this
project drew upon methodologies of that discipline, as well as of writing, and
proceeded from an understanding that theorising can take many forms,
including performative action, sonic composition and varying writing styles.
Some of the foundational assumptions of this research are offered in this
introduction, to frame the discussion that follows, and particularly to clarify the
style in which it unfolds.
As will be discussed, the most pressing problem for the researcher of
football sound is that these sounds are elusive: disappearing on one hand in
absorption of play, and on the other in techniques of extraction and analysis
that render them something other than they are in play. This places football
sound in that family of phenomena largely excluded from critical discourse due
to an awkwardness of fit between how they are and the conventions of (most)
critique. Certainly play, sound and confounds are amongst those events that
have challenged theorists to develop alternative techniques that may admit
slippery quantitiesthe lawless and transforming, the invisible and ephemeral,
the mixed and inconsistent to greater possibility for critical reflection, shared
discussion and understanding.1

Taking up this challenge for this topicfootballs soundsI seek it to draw

it into the critical fold by particular means. There is a procession of philosophers
and artists who have forged unconventional critical paths, and this work is
particularly indebted to a number of them. The philosophers it draws upon
include Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi and Eshun; and
artists: Artaud, Duchamp, Castellucci, Migone, Ground Zero, Sachiko M, Aki
Onda, and Dj Spooky. The former may all be said to approach philosophy as a
staging that conceives thinking/writing/reading as a bodily and affective act (It
is our habit to think outdoorswalking, leaping, climbing, dancing our first
questions about the value of a book, of a human being, of a musical
composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance? (Nietzsche, 1974
[1887], p. 322)); 2 the latter make art that seeks to
address/dismantle/revolutionise knowing through that process observed by
Adorno whereby: The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as
immanent problems of form (Adorno in Labelle, 2007, p. xvii). 3
These particular precedents are seen as useful because they all situate
knowing in intertwined relation with doing, and with materiality; and attempt to
draw their readers/spectators into this intertwininginto experience and
affect and make this part of the understanding that is built. Knowledge is
conceived as an experience of knowing, a Nietzschean intelligere.4 This kind
of knowing is particularly helpful for understanding football/sound, which is
situated in varying conditions of absorption and elaboration that playfulness
producesin process, in situ. Conceiving research as a process of knowledgemaking draws it close to this situated-playfulness, and this formal resemblance
between the style of the research and the operations of its topic will enable (it is
hoped) not just an illustration of the operating style/s of the topic, but an actual
appearance, a manifestation, of notions that cannot easily be expressed in
critique, in critique: swarming, collision, vibrating, absorption, emerging. It is
hoped these will appear.

Football
The discussion that follows largely draws upon professional (Australian) football
games for its examples. However, a broader definition of what football is is at
work here, and it will be useful to declare this at the outset, to help explain the
breadth of concern that the paper proceeds to embrace. In my PhD research
and in this article, I have adopted Brian Massumis view of football as an
unformalised proto-sport retrospectively framed by codes and rules,5 and have
concerned myself with its unformalised variations as well as its configurations in
the theatres of professional sport. Thus sounds of football can include not only
the roar of the stadium and cry and call of big men thundering on-ground, but
also: the softer bumps and tumbles, barks and laughter of a game of kick-to-kick
with dogs and kids in the back yard, chat about the weekends games on the
train on Monday morning, sounds of media commentary, talkback radio calls,
the links and jingles that dingaling through football media programs, and so on.
This broad definition of football grants access to certain of its
characteristics that are particularly important to its sounding, specifically: its
field of play. Much of what interests about footballs sounds is to do with how
they stream through the conditions of absorption and elaboration that unfold in
it (this will be explained below). In order to bring these conditions to discussion,
a way of understanding football as a dynamic field, of invested wit and
transforming affect, needs to be articulated, and raised as an alternative to more
conventional definitions of it as a code, a game, a set of substantial terms whose
interrelationship is governed by tradition, rules and so on. To assist, Massumi
offers a distinction between what he calls footballs event dimension and its
event spaces, thus,
The play is the event-dimension doubling the empirical event-space in which the
substantial terms in play physically intermix. The dimension of the event is above
the ground, between the goals, between the players, and around the ball on all
sides. It is that through which the substantial elements interrelate it is nothing
without them. They are inert and disconnected without it, a collection of mere
things (Massumi, 2002, pp. 7576).

This event dimension is of particular importance to footballs sounds and what

they do (they affect, they suck us in, and spit us out of absorption in play), thus
it is emphasised here over the details of the empirical event spaces which it
doubles. This is not to say that the event spaces are unimportant. Clearly not.
People are ferociously attached to the substantial terms of footballs event
spaces, and this ferocity and these terms feed back into its field of play. It is a
question of relative emphasis. This research on football sound emphasises the
play-ful event dimension in order to stay close to its interests (sounding), and so
here, when particularities of place and thing are asked to stand aside to allow a
more germane definition of what football is, I hope the reader will allow it.6
Let us begin.
Something is Missing
Despite the manifest importance of sound to football, and to those who play
football (considering all participants to be players)that is heard in the lively
sounding of games, on sports radio, TV and in jokes and chatterthere is little
investigation of this aspect of play in those discourse areas which like to
comment on whats important in culture: critical, cultural, and art theory, sports
scholarship, journalism, even art itself. All for the most part overlook footballs
sounding. There are some exceptions.7 Nevertheless, compared say with
discussion of sound in the cinema, or reflection on the development of the
origins of the game in football, there is not a lot to be found on its sounding.
Why is this? Does no one listen? 7 million people went to a game of Australian
football in 2007 (a fair percentage of a total population of 21 million) (Hess et
al., 2008, p. 380)! Is there nothing of interest to share? Given something so
passionately (and noisily) practised, there is a rather mystifying silence on the
question of sounds importance to the game, the nature of its affects/effects.
However, this silence is not such a mystery if considered from the
perspective of one who plays. For example, hanging over the fence on matchday, munching on chips, intent to listen, I keep forgetting to. Instead I am
sucked into the dynamics of play and thus, at the end of the gamecovered in
salt, beer and bad humour from losingmust concede: football is not meant to
4

be listened to; it is not addressed to the ears. Of course there are practices of
listening in it, but listening to it as a whole involves a very uncomfortable
extraction of the listener from play. What are you doing? will you just watch the
game! My companion snaps as I hunch under my poncho scribbling notes
about sonic nuance, while rain pours down and crucial developments unfold on
ground. Then frowns at me in irritation when I look up to ask: What
happened?! Why are they taking him off? Listeningin the style implied by the
initial enquiry, with a still-head and open earsseems at odds with play, moved
and blocked-up in its confusion. In football the listenerwhom we wish
would contribute to this discussion we are missingis continuously and
violently distracted, is squashed, unbalanced, and/or also, just plain bored and
fed up. Surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille (whose love of dirt and
squashedness particularly recommends him as a philosopher of footballSee
Bois and Krauss, 1999)) pointed out the peril in choosing the sacred as an
object of study: the object whose nature is to annihilate its own limits the
object which is not an object, since it is above all the destruction of any object
(Bataille, 1994 [19761988], p.120). This is similar. Football sound is not, if it is
extracted from footballs play. Footballs play unfolds in absorption and
involvement of bodies, forces, attention, sounding. Thus sound in footballs play
is not really there for critical discourse to discuss. If football is approached in
the spirit of its play, if we are actually there and not tourists or theatregoers
(as impartial visitors to the football are sometimes called), there is no sound,
only play, in which sound and ability to listen is lostthe object of interest
destroyed.
However, one of sounds characteristics is precisely that it unthethers
and travels. It leaks from the immediate territory of its production creating all
sorts of ambiguities, all sorts of additional affects/effects. This characteristic of
sound may present potentials for study that Batailles object, the sacred, does
not possess. After all, sounds-in-footballs play can be extracted from their
entanglement with the implicated listener relatively easilywhether walking
through the streets, we smile at our friend, upon hearing a great roar surge from
inside the faraway stadium, or we set up a microphone at the game. It is easy
5

enough to pick up football sounds without falling into the drama of play. For the
purposes of my own research I handed the task of extraction to microphones,
still-headed and open eared, that can be trusted to get the job done without
becoming confounded in play. This they certainly managed. Producing hours
and hours of sound-record that thoroughly unhinges footballs sounding from its
playthe progressions of which are very difficult to divine in the listening-back.
However upon listening, the question arises (Batailles ghost whispers): but what
relationship does this sound-record actually have to the sounds of the football?
The Limits of Recording
For the microphones bring their own limits to bear. When microphones
encounter footballthinking of the game on ground, the game in processthey
encounter a swarm: multiple constellations of moving bodies that diffuse and
then cohere, simultaneous, fast and often, in unpredictable patterns. The spatial
parameters of football are unstabledifferent from what microphones are more
commonly asked to attend: a musician, an interview subject, a train passing,
cricket chirping or other sound effect; all, pretty much, spatially predictable.
The volume and frequencies of footballs sounds, produced by its nodes of
action assembling, disassembling, moving towards and away from the mic and
by repeated and forceful collisions that create extreme volume jags, challenge
the material fragility and limited range of microphones enormously. This motion
translates to the sound-record in startling bursts of deafening distortion, which
then give way to long stretches of faraway, murmury, cry and call, as the action
moves 100meters up the ground and all around lose interest or cannot see; and
then, this is all delivered to the researcher nestled in a bed of operating hum
and handling noise. In other words microphones struggle to deliver a clear
record of this volatile sound environment and in the attempt contribute sounds
and effects that are not actually part of play.
Of course it is possible to embrace the noisy struggles of the mic to
capture footballs sound, as part of the games becoming (see Massumi, 2002,
p.81 on media transmissions as the becoming of the event, and also Kahn,
1999, p. 2122 on the attraction of noise). Much draws interest in the crash and
6

mutter of such recordings. Nonetheless, interesting though they may be, it must
still be admitted that layers of footballs sonic detail are lost in the making. For
instance, microphones cannot penetrate on-ground play for fear of interfering
with it and/or being destroyed. When, on rare occasions an on-ground player is
rigged with a wireless mic, as St Kildas Robert Harvey was for his final game in
2008 (an event that must have been subject to approval by the Controlling
Body, so as not to contravene the laws of the game. See Item 9: Players Boots,
Jewellery and Protective Equipment, Australian Football League, 2009, pp. 30
31), the possibilities for recording remain limited by the singular pathways that
the players body takes, and the relatively gigantic amplification of its sounding:
NEVERGIVEUPBOYS! NEVERGIVEUP!, and monstrous breathing. The sounds
of variety in the swarm, and relations of various elements: moving, involving
Robert Harveys body and then leaving it alone are drowned out, overwhelmed
by the amplified sounds of the singular players motion. The singular bodys
contribution in play is rendered by the microphone a collected, sonic point,
rather than a node in an articulating, creating, multiplicitous swarm. Even say it
was possible to mic everybody up at the game. Say some remarkable benefactor
and army of technical staff swept in and taped microphones onto all the bodies
on the ground, and in the stands, and then placed a bevy of mics on stands
around the boundary and throughout the crowd to record motion-perspective.
Well, we would gather an amazing degree of sonic detail, but this would
present real difficulties for listening-back. How would we do it? Listen to each
track end-on-end, for the rest of our life? Or perhaps isolate discreet sections of
the ground and listenchopping territories out of global space of play? Or
would we try allatonce? No doubt! In which case encounter a deafening
perspective of everywhere-simultaneously100,000 singular perspectives
played back in the instant! An exciting proposition, but which would very
likelythis is conjecture, I knowdrown out that sense of assembly and
disassembly, the moving of disparate elements towards and away from a point,
from a number of points, that relies on each unit in play having partial
perspective, on being distant from some things and close to others, perceiving
some things and not able to perceive others. Which is to say, even if we
7

managed to make a sound record of IT ALL, we would eliminate particular

sonic qualitiesdistance effects, what might be called constitutive
incomprehensibilities (I am varying Brian Massumis term constitutive
vagueness here, Massumi, 2002, p. 97)important to footballs play and its
sounding: sonic qualities that issue from the relation of the singular to the
multiple, from each unit engaging, disengaging, and re-engaging in varying
constellations throughout which sonority flows and overflows.8
Thus, where no doubt loyal microphones hear more than I ever
willhanging over the fence, caught in plays confusionand deliver a record
of football sounds untethered aspect, that sets play free towards new
becomings, this record by no means effects an untrammelled transference of
football-sound from where and how it occurs in play, to the receptive ears of
the researcher (who we are hoping will shortly contribute some understandings
about it to discussion!). There are problems with the instruments limited
capacity to receive, and problems with how it re-shapes the listening experience
in line with these limits. Batailles ghost will not drop this question: what
relationship does the sound-record that microphones gather actually have to the
sounds of the football?
Rather less than one might wish for. For microphones achieve an
extraction of sounds from play and extraction of listening-attention from play
that refocusses it on sound, in an instance of what Michel Chion has called
reduced listening: listening for the purpose of focusing on the qualities of the
sound itself independent of its source or meaning (Chion in Labelle, 2007, p.
206). Whilst this might be alright, useful even, for making an analysis of the
decibel levels of the roar of the crowd, or tracking the path of verbal messages
passed between players, producing an atmos track to run behind television
adsanything that requires segregating particular sonic effects from the
originary ground of that unhinged recordwhen the interest is in football sound
as it issues from and feeds into a playful event dimension, then extracting its
sounds from what conditions their existence, that is play, for the purpose of
listening to them, seems at best a bit wide of the mark, and at worst potentially
damaging to our capacity to understand what interests us, for this process risks
8

rendering football-sound a bunch of stable categoriesperhaps pitch,

rhythm, timbre; maybe crowd sound, onground calls, sports-chatter. In
any case terms that may come to stand in for something they cannot
representsounds in playin the process of hypostasis, that Brian Massumi has
called an endemic danger to critical thought (Massumi, 2002, pp. 165169).
Hypostasis refers to that analytic process by which aspects of a
phenomenon are segregated as general abstractions abstract tools for seeing
something else abstract entities that serve inductive analysis (Massumi,
2002, p. 165). Massumi does not altogether dismiss such techniques, but warns
how this diagnostic de-situation tends to squeeze out anomalies, singularities
and mutable mixtures from its stable, abstract categories, wherein things have
value only for their uniformity or resemblance to each other (Massumi, 2002,
pp. 166167).
The problem with desituating sound from where it unfolds in relation
with play, and establishing it as a sound-record for reduced-listening, is that
what most interests in this sound is precisely its situatedness: football
playfulness. This does not refer to, or only to, a relation with the places in which
it is produced (the football ground, say) but rather its relation to the
complicated, unstable, unpredictable movements of the football swarm (broadly
conceived, encompassing all on and non-ground players, football media,
chit-chat environments, kids and dogs in the back yard, dreaming: the lot) in
play. That is its situatedness. One that ranges across many interlinked and
overlapping sites, moves across varying modes of articulation (including that
constitutive incomprehensibility mentioned above), and, furthermore has a
particular power to draw all quantities that approach it into immediate,
immanent implication. Precisely those phenomena Massumi warns will be
thrown out and discounted in hypostasis: anomaly, singularity, movement,
mixturenear/far, swarming, surprise, hurtling, collision,
knowingsomethingbeforeithappensare what interests in footballs sounding,
are what is missing from critical consideration, and are what this research must
protect, and project. If it can.

The Value of Beer, Salt and Bad Humour

Thus, whilst noting football sounds untethered aspect with keen interest,
experimenting with the potentials of this particular sonic propertygathering it,
listening to it and remixing itit is important to insist on returning it to the
relation it has been extracted from: beer, salt, bad humour, as it were. This is
not to reduce the potentials of our enquiry, insisting that if the phenomenon is
not directly concerned with footballs game its not important, but driven by a
wish to articulate precisely the relation between those sounds in/of/conditioned
by play and their varying effects/affects, including how they exceed their own
conventions, untethering, taking flightin the piercing shriek of the barrackerbehind, producing a migraine in your own head, crowd roar transiting into
advertising-jingles, wry interjections dropped into the everyday (you should
always take your boots along) even appearing in academic research! Refusing
to accept that these departures somehow divide sounding from play (as is
suggested in the aesthetics/function split that plagues sport theory, although it
has long since been discarded in art theory (Moller & Nauright, 2003;
Gumbrecht, 2006); and also in the tedious listening/hearing split that
discussions of sound are always trying to wriggle free of (Hegarty, 2007, p.197)),
pursuing instead extensions in the reach (and definition) of the playing field, and
elaborating its modes of articulation, some spinning away to
whoknowswhereimperceptibilitysome folding back into play and effecting
it precisely. Thus considering footballs sounding from within its most
confounded and impossible-to-listen-to relation in play as well as in its
elaborated forms that represent both a phase shift in reach of play and
transformation of play into other types of matter, implying other styles of
listening/reception. Furthermore, considering the relation between these styles
of sonorous involvement: absorption, elaboration. Embracing, as sonic qualities,
the movement of this relation in (sonic) sensation: emergence, collision, shock,
transformation, concentration, disappearance, echo (ghosting!). Considering
these slippery qualities to be footballs situatedness and, as such, equally
critical to an understanding of what football is, as historical record and category
distinctions. Actually, moreso since so sorely lacking.
10

Thus the sounds of footballs play declared in the title of this article, and
pursued in my research, refers to varying sonorous conditions of absorption in
play and their elaboration; and the attempts to articulate them that I have made
are similarly focussed on these. This requires giving careful attention to various,
varying states of absorption of the listener-in-play, so these sonorous conditions
are not reduced either to falsely limiting necessities (Dont talk about it, just
DO it!) or else tossed in hypostasis too-hard basket for falling outside the play
of category comparisons that inductive analysis favours.
This is achieved, or attempted, by first of all insisting that all sounds of
the football are listened to, but are listened to in an unstable streaming of modes
the listener is passing through, and that effect her so thoroughly that she might
be said to dissolve out of the condition in which she is one who listens,
becoming distributed in a community of forces in play in which the question of
being a singular organism becomes far less certain, interesting or determining to
experience than what is implied in this title: the listener. The listener-tofootball is really a listener-in-football, she unravels, is drawn under, set free,
ground to particles by the (sonic) forces of the game.
Thus it becomes necessary to drop the notion of the listener, and the
fanciful stable perspective that this term implies (still-head, no rain or knees in
the ears) and find a better model for the sonorous material each one becomes.
Player is a better general term, but should be used with the understanding that
play is invariably a soundful business and to play is to be, one way or another
sounding. In my thesis, I go further to posit a number of sonorous constellations
(of body, motion, intent, relation to others) that players seem to enter. These are
not offered in an attempt to determine stable categories, and compare them, but
rather to give a sense of styles of sonorous absorption that we do and how these
move in play; towards articulating numerous relations of sound and/in body
and/in play, and to see if this terrain that interestssonorous movement of
absorption/elaborationcan be better articulated thus.
I call them the constellation of the body of to emphasise that a
broadly conceived constellation of forces and forms may be considered a
body, as much as the singular human unit that is usually referred to with this
11

term (this becomes very useful in discussing footballs play).9 For now, by way
of example, let me offer descriptions of the constellation of the body of
collision, and the constellation of the body of the afternoon:
The constellation of the body of collision is built of crash, roar, smash,
scream. Built of noise, the incredible excitement of force and friction that
Kodwo Eshun identifies as common to action movies and Djing (Eshun, 1999, p.
180). So too football. A body forcing techniques of domination and submission
to the fore by reducing the shelters that any singular body has at its disposal to
help it weasel out of confrontation with its world. In the body of collision
sinister threats are made and the fatal weapon of command is spoken (Canetti,
2000 [1962], pp. 303306); sound is exercised upon the body in order to
wound, frighten, reduce it to a materiality that traps and extinguishes its
freedom. Panic. Vile curses. Choking. But also, here there is liberation:
overcoming isolation of singularity to join in ecstatic communion, leaving the
self by the door, entering another world of elemental force and form where
anything seems possible. West Coast Eagle, Beau Waters: I screamed! I
screamed until I couldnt scream anymore and then we jumped around and we
hugged and mate, I just Oh-oh. I seriously cant describe the feeling (Waters,
2006). World-making through entering the worlds materiality; acting, not
considering action. The temporality of the body of collision is not fast or slow
but rather, intense. Time becomes dark-matter, different from story-time, daytime, measured-time, much heavier than usual, massive with noise, and is
instantaneous: dropping in great resounding, fleeting seconds. The extraordinary
moments at the end of a close game. The commentator screaming: 9 seconds
to go! as though things can still change in this short time. They can. All know. It
takes only one! Every mouth howling an open vowel. The body in collision,
roaring its endless instants.
The constellation of the body of afternoon is snoozy, distracted, relaxed,
where objects fall-together and settle in a companionable tangle, making small
shifts to accommodate and ease closer. Here we tickle and murmur, becoming
the articulated and extended bodies of giggling, happy humming, and sighing:
softening into dreams, and haunting, hypnagogic sounds; entering interzones

12

between states we might call conscious. The temporality of the afternoon is

long, infinite even, hence its potentials seem endless. In it we unhinge in
delicacy of sounding, tiny sounds enchant: scratch and squeakrain on the
roof, murmur of commentary from the radio; in it we laugh, overjoyed to find
ourselves connected in touch and humour, to the dog, the corduroy, the warm
earth, each other. Yielding. Space opens, to dream, to sleep. A story may hold
us together, and sense of approaching, encroaching othernessthe end of the
game, Mum coming to pick us upbut the story is actually just a boundary
within which our sharing, our community, can flourish: delightful people, lovely
surfaces, sting of salt, and cool of beer in the throat, snuggled warm between
our mates on the bench. The constellation of the body of the afternoon is
secured in familiarity and at the same filled with freedom to depart it in
wonderful arcs: here we (might) befriend birds and animals, magic carpets, our
lucky footy socks, blades of grass. Here we (may) slip between everything, tiny,
invisible, slipping into the future, into dreams.10
In theseand many other constellationsthat are styles of sonorous
absorption in play, the listener is no more, or only fleetingly, tactically. She is
but one of a number of moving properties. In these constellations the quantity of
the listeners body is overcome, melting, distributed, intermixed with other
objects and forces, filling and emptying with sound, producing it, submitting to
it. This basic condition, singularity-overcome, is a fundamental property of play
(that Brian Sutton-Smith argues is characterised by: quirky shifts and latent
potentials, redundancy, proliferation of form and flexibility (Sutton-Smith,
1997, pp. 222224)), and of football (players in the heat of the game are drawn
out of themselves. Any player who is conscious of himself as he kicks, misses
(Massumi, 2002, p. 74)), and of sounding (Noises as densely and loosely
clustered as butterflies on a hot flower bed. Every step stirs a song, a quarrel, a
flapping of wet linen, a rattling of boards, a babys bawling, a clatter of buckets
(Benjamin in Kahn, 1999, p. 29)). These three are hinged at precisely this point,
this swarming: singularitys dissolution in play of forces and forms that undo it.
They nest inside one another neatly as Russian dolls, but permeable: fusing and
flowing across each others boundaries. Singularitys dissolution in play of forces
13

and forms that undo it in swarming, is the condition without which football
would just be a ball on a pedestal, in a museum, with a caption that explains
what it is: inert, a set of terms caught in a diagnostic desituation (Massumi,
2002, p. 166). Thus, playful, soundful, football-swarming has become the key
figure in my enquiry into the sounds of football, and furthermore key to my
attempts to admit this topic to shared perspective, productively.11
To gather: Football sound is (largely) missing from critical discourse
because it disappears, on one hand in play, where listening and sound are
not, and on the other hand in a set of limited analytic toolsrecording
techniques that produce reduced listening, other forms of hypostasisthat bear
it so far from the play that conditions it, it becomes something else, and
uninteresting. What is needed is a way to reconceive research techniques such
that the relation of sound in footballs play can be divined. This involves
refiguring the listener as rather a player, entwined in varying states of sonorous
absorption. And listening as dissolving in varying constellations of singularityovercome that include and involve all sorts of objects and forces. Then finding
a way to bring this expanded position, this soundful, playful, football
swarmthat cannot be recorded, and should not be hypostasisedto critical
discourse. How can it be done?
Reconceiving Roles
The first thing is to make a direct link between the player hanging over the fence
at the football, dissolving in sound and play, and the researcher assembling her
critique. Plug them one into the other. This researcher of football sound, if she
has any nous, is going to have to relinquish her still-head as well. If she wants to
contact singularitys dissolution in play of forces and forms that undo it, then
she has to play. Otherwise, she is just a theatre-goer, or, even worse: a theatre
criticand in terms of the football, these contribute nothing, they are deadspace where space has the potential to contain so much, whole new worlds! If
the researcher does not wish to style herself as a sink of dead space into which
play falls, never to be heard from again, she is going to have to enter the
swarming. This means she must avoid pronouncing herself anything other than
14

a player, avoid inaugurating research-performances that impede flow and

numerousness of swarming relationsno interviews, no staged recordings, no
insistence on clearing a space, finding a quiet spot and be-careful-you-mightbreak-the-microphone. Rather researching by being barely discriminating,
undone in force, fury and boredom; seeking after currents of fascination, only
what draws, what magnetises: ear-catching or skin-crawling textures, fun or
frightening effects, sonic surprises, good jokes, intriguing language. This barelydiscriminating style of researching generates a degree of aleatory affect that may
allow it to exceed the limitations of the researchers methodological control and
her imagination, allow it to swarm with the properties knocking at its gates,
inviting the researcher and her special skills into play. The researcher of football
must throw open the gate when it is knocked on, and run out onto the road,
looking for some friend, dog or wall, to have a kick with.
The researchers articulation of ideas, sounding and movement of play,
has to keep emphasis on the numerous, the varying, and avoid practice of
establishing categories that throw focus on themselves, in a theatre of hypostatic
comparison and exclusion-from. This means, for the most part favouring
addition and proliferation over reduction and clarificationproliferation of
concepts, sounds, sites, theories, techniquesto see which of them works to
produce compelling play. If all they produce is a mess, then that is not play.
Football doesnt do mess. It is sometimes messy, but always with wit gathering
inside its din, grinding whatever unpredictable combinations of force and form
come its way to make space, and produce flow. Articulating the numerous and
varying in researching football sound means accepting all-comers, drawing
them, willy-nilly, into relationship, unafraid of redundancy, mess or noise.
Trusting that application of concentrated force in play will eventually produce a
perfect line, an extraordinary feint, that will progress.
The question of how the reader of this research is being conceived, can
now be addressed. Since, if the listener is gone, and the researcher is
gonesingularities overcome and wilfully submitting to swarming of footballs
play and playful-soundingit seems unlikely that the reader is going to get to
keep her still-head and open ears.
15

It will surprise no one: the reader must also be posited in play, and able
to be undone in swarmingsingularity overcomewhich, for a start,
necessitates dropping this title the reader and replacing it with something more
adequate: the reading-listening-player-swarming. A title that is so shockingly
awkward it cannot be used, but the construction of which is nonetheless a
guiding principle of the research (because it is so awkward I will not keep
writing it but instead use the reader when I am talking about the reception of
word, and the listener when I am talking about the reception of sound, also
the listener when I am talking about the reception of confounded states.
Quotation marks in each instance to remind that the terms are used ironically).
This research attempts to undo the reader in playful swarm of ideas, sounds,
forces; a swarm that possesses the qualities of numerousness, variation and
movement between conditions of sonorous absorption and elaboration, that are
of concern to it. Being drawn into play thus, it is hoped, will not only give an
experience of what is being described but allow notions that are usually shut
out of critical discourse (by hypostasis, by positing all parties as still and
singular, or by refusing critique altogether) to enter and contribute.
Thus the figure of the swarm becomes key to the execution of the
research. The player of football, the listener, the researcher and the reader
are all reconceived as forces in swarming-play, where play is understood to be
always-sounding, and understanding to be a form of becoming, not necessarily
a form of arriving at resolution, and stillness.
Another ghost, not Bataille, someone more pragmatic, is asking: all very
well, but concretely (if I may presume to use this term), how is this managed?
Like this, Ghost.
Creating the Swarm
This research-swarming tries to draw its readers and listeners into states of
sonorous absorption, at least part of the time, to turn them fleetingly into bodies
in play. It is not necessary to reproduce the conditions of a football game to do
this; play of other objects can produce a swarm for one who wants to enter,
negotiate and be overcome-in. Objects at our disposal include concepts, words
16

(and techniques of their objectification e.g. writing, pages, screens), sounds and
techniques for their placement (e.g. iPod, headphones, edit, mix and playback)
and any number of other objects and things that our contributions encounter,
meet onground as it were, that will join the research-swarm and progress its
play.
Possibilities for this play-ful engagement are explored in my PhD thesis
through use of writing techniques that try to bring word more forcefully into
swarming. In it writing proceeds in passages, rather than travelling long and
conclusive. It does not build an argument, but builds many, and does not
explicitly weave and resolve them. Words flood play and its sounding with wit
and rhetorical flourish (I hope) to provoke a response or two in the bodies and
temper of the reader. They offer, rather than a story, with beginning, middle
and end, a swarming that can be played (in) over and overas in Nietzsche,
Deleuze and Guattari. There is no end. The pleasure and power of the work/the
word lies in the potentials it offers one to become unstitched and invited to
play in singularity-overcome, much more interesting condition than being one
who understandsat least if we are trying to contribute an understanding of
football sound to shared perspective.
Of course the research must also sound, since articulating that nesteddoll relation of football, sound, and play is the whole point. Again, this does not
mean reproducing precisely the sounds of the game, but rather making sounds
that address the body of the listener specifically, drawing her into conditions of
sonorous absorption and elaboration that we feel at the football. Conditions that
overcome singularity and shatter us through varying constellations of force and
form.
In the sound mixes I present in the thesis, hundreds of samples have been
gathered from football environments, and made very short. Then they have been
clustered together with other tiny sounds made from pins, bells, beeps, rattles,
in which a hard point of attack is combined with soft clouds of decay and
releasethink of a bell, how it both clinks and rings. All of these sounds have
been layered and crowded together to make larger clouds (a cloud is a swarm
with potential for dematerialisation. A helpful image, combining sense of
17

density and disappearance); then these clouds have been gathered in

sometimes-contrast, sometimes-drowsy-making similarity with other clouds and
shreds of sound.
In this the possibility is pursued that a body, the listeners, may start to
overcome itself in swarming when placed in proximity with other swarming
materials. This view arises from my experience of ambient and other forms of
cloudy music (Xenakis especially), 12 and also of listening to football
commentary on the radio (think: snoozy Saturday, after lunch, on the couch,
pies v kangas on ABC Grandstand, and ). In addition see Deleuze and
Guattaris conviction that the body and unconscious are themselves swarmstructures:
A multiplicity of pores, or blackheads, of little scars or stitches. Breasts, babies,
and rods. A multiplicity of bees, soccer players, Tuareg. A multiplicity of wolves
or jackals All of these [dreams, hallucinations] bring us to a certain status of
the formations of the unconscious The full body without organs is a body
populated by multiplicities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 30).

The sonic compositions I have made attempt to conjure this multiplicitous body
from the body of the listener by conjuring it first of all in the body of the
hundreds-of-samples, then letting this loose in proximity to the body of the
listener. Furthermore, this swarming body, these swarming bodies, are also
summoned by consideration of the duration of the listening and the site/s in
which it is likely to occur.
The sounds comprise three, 70 minute mixes of the same group of
samples, presented on iPod. It is hoped that this will, in total, be a bit too much
to listen to, at least in one sitting. 3.5 hours is an intrusion on the easy rhythms
of life and must, surely, be interrupted by other forces in the listeners vicinity.
In this, the compositions aspire to a mash-up between themselves and whatever
environment the listener is in: rooms, people, animals, projectiles. Thus
expanding the field of play, the sonorous swarm, to gather-in unknown details
of the environments it enters.

18

The sounds are presented on an iPod shuffle. This is the kind of iPod that
has no screen. Having no screen means there is no easy way for the listener to
know, or orient herself within the precise duration of the pieces. This
encourages the possibility that she will get lost in them, and have to begin
again, or fast forward to the next, or just plunge in with fingers crossed and
hope for the best. All of which undermines the tendency/habit to listen in that
style we have rejected: with still-head and open ears, holding oneself out of the
mess of play. Thus the mixes themselves encourage a semi-attentive,
interrupted, listening that borrows directly from footballs swarm (also, no doubt
from John Cage). 13 The idea is to produce, and undo, the listeners body as an
effect, and a limit, and a contributor. The listener conceived as multiple,
excessive, force that chooses, resists, schemes, gets bored, tears the headphones
from the head, falls asleep; that makes the listening a negotiation, a play, and
not a lecture.
In addition the pages of the thesis are unbound, tied in bundles by
bootlaces, and presented in a box (with the iPod), itself tied by more bootlaces.
Handfuls of small, round, bells are added to the box to make it sound and
contribute a sense of movement and play. The idea is that all objects that
comprise the thesis may swarm, despite being ordered in line with the
principles and intentions of the research. The lines, it is hoped, will break. The
objects are bundled and rearrangeable and may escape. They are not pinned
down in perfect binding and page numbers (though there are some of the latter).
The listener must enter into negotiation with these materials: tying and untying
knots, stopping or playing with the jingling bells, perhaps keeping them away
from the cat, fiddling with wires, and headphones, pressing buttons, squinching
the brow, muttering, rustling around.
That, dear Ghost, is how I have attempted it.
(In) Conclusion
Possibly this account of research into sounds of footballs play is doomed to
disappoint, since, like a theatre review, it can only say: then this happened,
then this happened. The affect, the effectiveness of the event cannot be judged

19

by the reader of the articlewho has no iPod, or passages of words, or bells to

play with. The least I can do to mitigate disappointment is make the conclusion
brief: My response to noticing a silence in critical discourse, on the question of
football sound, its importance, its effects and affects, has been to propose a style
of research that has, in my view, a better chance of approaching it, than do
styles of inductive analysis. This requires recasting quantities we may encounter
in such research, like the researcher, the reader, the listener, as well as
processes of understanding, so that they are conceived anew as mutable,
implicated, and at play in the process of articulating the topic; and the topic
itself as a relation between a completely confounded absorption in playin
which sound is lostand a range of elaborated, untethered sonic arcs that
escape from that absorbed context to varying effect. All a very slippery business
indeed. Ultimately this has led me to seize upon the figure of swarming as key
to approaching the research, and to produce a swarm-as-research that aims to
draw the reading-listening-player-swarming into play, in the hope that this
process will not only give an experience of what is being described but allow
notions that are usually shut out of critical discourse (by hypostasis, by positing
all parties as still and singular, or by refusing critique altogether) to enter and
contribute. No doubt one of the problems with making such researchthat
seeks to produce play that might further confound it, in the site where it
encounters a reader, a listeneris that its impact may be difficult to establish.
It will, if it has its way, fail or succeed unwitnessed, out of sight and in an
infinite number of possible locations. I will not make great claims for it then. Its
value is without question unproven. Nonetheless, it is not done and dusted. I
stand by it, with sense of anticipation, and ready to play on.

Endnotes
1

See Turner, 1986, p. 31; Sutton-Smith, 1997, pp. 13 on the difficulty of admitting
play to academic discourse; Kahn & Whitehead, 1992, pp. 15, on similar problems
faced by sound; Massumi, 2002, pp. 162176 for an account of problems with
analysing singular or confounded forms.

20

See also Bataille, 1994; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Eshun, 1999; Massumi, 2002.
All are philosophical works that attempt to stage an encounter between the reader and
the book/knowledge, as much as explain a set of theories or phenomena.
3

See for interesting descriptions and/or examples of this work: Adcock, 1992; Artaud,
1958 [1938]; Castellucci et al., 2007; Dj Spooky, 2004; Ground Zero, 2005; Migone,
2001; Onda and Hatanaka, 2002; Sachiko M, 2000.
4

Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! [Not to laugh, not to
lament, nor to detest but to understand] says Spinoza as simply and sublimely as is his
wont. Yet in the last analysis, what else is this intelligere than the form in which we
come to feel the other three at once? (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887], p. 261).
5

[In] the history of sport, as with virtually every collective formation, the codification
of rules follows the emergence of an unformalized proto-sport exhibiting a wide range
of variation. The formal rules of the game capture and contain the variation (Massumi,
2002, p. 71, his emphasis). I do understand that this view is contested. There is another
perspective in analysis of sport that makes a much firmer distinction between play and
games. In this perspective the rules of a game tend to distance it from its playful
origins, leading it towards other purposes and effects. The more rules and attendant
formality, the more diminished the sense of play. In this view, rules are normally
patent adaptations of those of existing games, rather than the containment of termless,
playful, variation, as Massumi suggests (Rogers, 1982, p. 229). I remain unconvinced
that playfulness diminishes just because ferocious seriousness and rule may appear.
Artists cannot hold this view. Massumi makes better sense of my experiences in both
football and art. The event dimension is not distanced by its codification in event space
(the unfolding of an actual game with rules and whatnot), despite being effected by
these. In this view both can exist, playandgame, simultaneously (and a fair bit besides,
effects of ground, weather, crowd), conditioning, affecting and effecting one another,
intertwined.
6

In spite of this I do acknowledge that the style of football underpinning the variations
encountered in course of this research, is (almost) exclusively that of the Australian
game, and this no doubt has its effects. For instance in my thesis I speculate that the
Australian gameits swirlyness, lack of off-side rule and playing ground of variable
dimensions disposes it to the kind of analysis undertaken here (Trail, 2009, n.1, pp.
196199). That is, the Australian game can be seen to exemplify practices of invention,
exploring combinations of material and immaterial quantities to varying affect/s, thus
lending itself to an analysis in (sonic) terms. Other styles of football, or other games, it
is implied, may not be so amenable. However the particular effects of this stylethe
relation of the Australian Football Leagues football code to the variations that surround
and elaborate itare of less interest to the research than are the variations,
multiplicities, disappearances of the code in transmutations that can only barely be
considered football. It is towards this other, styleless, placeless dimension of play that
the study of footballs sounding has led us, and so the particular contributions of this
(Australian) style (and comparison between it and other codes) is asked to stand aside
in order that all of football may be considered, with no variation excluded.
7

Some significant works of art drawing on sounds of football, and of sport more
broadly, include: Sonia Leber and David Chesworths sound installations 5000 Calls

21

and The Persuaders (Leber & Chesworth, 2009a, 2009b); Ror Wolfs radiophonic
collage Der Bal ist Rund (Wolf, 1987 [1979]); Gnther Koch Revisited, a collection of
music, sound and poetry on CD, that celebrates the style of German football
commentator Gnther Koch (Various Artists, 2000); Douglas Gordon & Philipe
Parrenos film, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Gordon & Parreno, 2006). Works of
scholarship that address sound, especially music (an emphasis that is regrettable in my
view) in sport and football include John Bale and Anthony Batemans Sporting Sounds:
Relationships between Sport and Music (Bale & Bateman, 2008); Les Backs Sounds in
the Crowd (Back, 2003, pp. 311327); Steve Redheads Post-Fandom and the
Millennial Blues: the Transformation of Soccer Culture (Redhead, 1997); and Mikita
Hoys Joyful Mayhem: Bakhtin, Football Songs and the Carnivalesque (Hoy, 1994, pp.
289304).
8

Recalling the broad definition of football that is offered in the introduction to this
article (an unformalised proto-sport, a play-ful event dimension) consider how, moving
away from formal football games, microphones will have an even harder time
capturing sounds of play than they do at the football oval on match-day. Because
without the familiar coordinates of sirens, whistles, chanting, what the sounds of play
actually are becomes harder to divine, and discerning thisand protecting them from
the overwhelming effects of all that is not-footballis beyond the powers of any
microphone. This is just to emphasise that no matter how football is defined,
microphones will have trouble capturing its sounding.
9

This way of thinking about a body is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari: A body
is not defined by the form that determines it ... a body is defined only by a longitude
and a latitude the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given
relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the
intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude).
Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 260). Not my body but a throng of relations.
10

For more on becoming like grass slipping between things and growing in the
midst of things, see Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 280.
11

See also Massumis description of the relationship of footballs field of play to its
rules: No field, no play and the rules lose their power (Massumi, 2002, p.72).
12

Listen to Xenakis La Legend dEer (Xenakis, 2005 [1977]) on headphones, in the

dark, if seeking an experience of becoming-swarming in proximity with swarming
sound.
13

I am thinking here of a performance piece John Cage made with Merce Cunningham
in 1965 called How to pass, kick, fall and run. Part of the performance was Cage
reading anecdotes and observations, like: Have you ever noticed how you read a
newspaper? Jumping around, leaving articles unread or only partially read, turning here
and there. Not at all the way one reads Bach in public (Cage, 1969, pp. 136137). It is
not necessary either to read, or listen, in that styleBach in publicthere are many
others.

22

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