Page - 24 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

24 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Birgit Abels | Musical Atmospheres and Sea-Nomadic Movement Among the Sama Dilaut atmosphere, and music that make the Regatta Lepa such a treasured event for the Sama Dilaut. My analysis will show how all three – movement, atmosphere, and tagunggu’ – constitute epi- stemic forms that enact each other. “There is nothing before movement; movement expresses how things are”, says John Urry (2007, 33). The same applies to music. As I will show below, the mutual enactment of movement, atmosphere, and music renders the procedural knowledge inherent in all three experiential, intensifying the effect each of the three has as a dimension of being-in-the-world and allowing for something new to come about between them. That something new is a distinctly and exclusively Sama Dilaut space: Semporna during the Regatta Lepa. The Sama Dilaut’s experiential Semporna involves both the individual’s physical body and the physical environment, comprising both sound itself and how it fills the space that is Semporna. The latter is not a matter of either outer materiality or inner perception. Rather, it involves both and emphasizes the relationship and continuum between the two. Music-making generally does this, as it does with any partaking of music: Sound is as much within the hear - ing/listening individual as it is materially “out there.”3 But with the sea-nomadic Sama Dilaut, their fundamentally mobile conception of space is heightened, even operated upon and made tangible, through the central role they ascribe to music making as a way of relating to their sur- roundings (cf. Fernando 2002, 27). I will elaborate on the processes behind this in greater detail below. In this way, music elicits an experience of their world as this world is coming into being, to paraphrase Ingold. Far from serving merely symbolic purposes, this experience in sound “gets to you,” as my interlocutor put it – it gets to you as an atmosphere. It is this triangular relationship between an intrinsically mobile spatiality, music-making, and atmosphere that I seek to explore in this article. Clearly, the mind-body dichotomy that continues to bear such a substantial imprint on the way human beings are imagined in the North Atlantic intellectual tradition is not analytically productive here. In this line of thinking, human beings are generally seen as subjects that form a “seat of awareness, bounded by the skin, and set over against the world” (Ingold [2000] 2011, 243). This, however, raises the fundamental problem of perception usually referred to as the “mind – body problem”: How can anything “cross over” from the outside to the inside, from the presumably material world to the presumably immaterial mind (ibid.; Crane and Patterson 2000; Leys 2011)? Music washes over this and other ontological categories like wavelets in the sand, as the example of tagunggu’ makes so abundantly clear. Here, a place is not conceived of as a set of material properties perceived by a subjective entity, but a fleeting sensation that is coming about in the act of making sense of the place musically. It becomes a part of ourselves, a realization of the sensation that “[w]e cannot define where a body begins and where external nature ends” (Whitehead 1968, 21). Resonating with both discursive and non-discursive fra- mes, musicking (Small 1998) transcends the notions of inside and outside by way of its prima- rily corporeal experiential quality. At the same time, it relates to both. In the words of Lawrence 3 This notion of sound differs from both the widely accepted scientific view that defines sounds as waves that propagate through a medium such as air and philosophical definitions of sound that view music as essentially a human mental construct. Both (and other) stances have analytical merit. Here, however, I am interested in music as atmospheres in shared situations, which emphasizes the relational affordances of sound and their bear- ing on social worlds. For this, I need to take into account both the sonic materiality and the shared sensation of musical events.