I decided to dedicate my time to Ghana Airways on a hunch that it would be interesting to narrate or communicate what I did anytime I found myself in an airport - thinking intently about my Ghanaian identity.

I refrain from describing Ghana Airways as a single entity (audio piece, website, installation, research work). It manifests as the product of interaction with composite parts of a chosen thematic focus. This product is intended to be dynamic and malleable yet, consistently placing my ideas on one vertex of an amorphous triangle, with my intended audience and thematic focus completing the form.

Through a self-prescribed process of experimentation and persistent trial and analysis, various threads on different characterisation of myself and Ghana knot each other in a web. My hope is that this web, at its minimum level of impact, refracts the conflict of considering identity.

The user or audience experiences Ghana Airways, through a website, hosting three audio episodes on post-colonial national identities. The website also contains a collection of texts, expanding the themes presented in the audio.

In this essay, I will attempt describing a few of the ways you can think about Ghana Airways:

A research pursuit

Oral knowledge systems and production

An exploratory critique of post-colonial identities

An interaction with dynamic digital audiences

I recommend you read this as my experience of challenging myself to communicate the conflict of identity through sound. I will be reflecting on my motivations and highlighting some of the practical mechanisms employed in making the sound of Ghana Airways. I hope it presents my perspective on thinking of making, making, and re-thinking making as a cyclic pattern anchoring my creative work.

A Research Pursuit

At the heart of Ghana Airways is a desire to stay purposefully engaged with knowledge.

Working under the guise of a research context, either artistic, academic or in this case both, offers me the flexibility to craft engaging methods for focusing on choosing my theme. My research process hinges on maintaining variable outcomes that shift in response to my engagement with academic, historic, or artistic sources. At the onset of the project, I decided on parameters that would limit my focus to a core set of ideas I assumed relevant.

This guide or protocol presents the advantage of emergence, as structures I did not foresee or cannot imagine, began to form simply by staying engaged with my sources. I was interested in ways Ghanaians would make themselves known, especially through sound. What are the unique phrases, or distinct utterances that are unmistakably Ghanaian? And what makes them “unmistakably Ghanaian”? How would I make myself known (as Ghanaian) through sound?

A pursuit emerges to find contrast, concern, conclusions or composites in songs, lyrics, ethnographic studies, political writing, or any material that offer a voice in helping me identify the bounds of the Ghanaian self. I allow these characterisations of self to fight for space within the structure I have intended to communicate. They are sometimes strong enough to appear whole. Other times, they are concatenated into new forms. Yet, all these characterisations exist for me to keep thinking about them.

The thrill or fuel for making, for me, is the joy of discovery. Having a list of guidelines or protocol allows me to consistently try and test different recipes that would lead to interesting discoveries. These discoveries, such as the oral knowledge system in Ghana and other ideas grounding my research pursuits are enumerated in the following paragraphs.

Framing Ghana Airways as a research pursuit is simply a production technique to give an idea some resilience. In this case, the idea to communicate the conflict of national identity I experience is strengthened by a guiding set of ideas.

Oral Knowledge Systems

I grew up in a version of Ghana that I remember to be an interesting place to hear. I am still fascinated by the ceaseless and immediate ingenuity Ghanaians apply to sound, in everything from mundane speech acts to mass communal performances. I always found an immediate sense of fulfilment from all the things I heard. Perhaps this is a nostalgic romanticisation, yet I find it fascinating enough to investigate.

Under the scope of this project, I consider oral knowledge to be forms of understanding, meaning and or experience that manifest in our interactions with sound. Irrespective of context, I believe there is some power in the ways in which you and I decide to organise sound in a communicative sense. In making Ghana Airways, I would start to think intently about my understanding of sound as a valid knowledge system. Making this work was a chance to produce and share knowledge about myself through this medium.

Ghana’s sonic heritage has been well explored by celebrated ethnomusicologists including Prof Emeritus J H Nketia and Prof Kofi Agawu. In “On the Historicity of Music in African Cultures”, Nketia posits a view of Oral Tradition as a repository of Akan culture, with references to their lineage, epics about their cosmology, explanations of their philosophies, etc., codified as rhythms and melodies passed on and evolved through listening and participating. (Nketia, 1982, p.52)

In Ghana Airways I hope to further Nketia’s thinking, using Ghanaian oral tradition as a source of culture and identity in my investigations of self. I am interested in traditional and modern techniques that allow rhythms, for example, to shape the semiotics of spoken language. As a Ghanaian, I am also interested in finding traces of my own way of producing and communicating knowledge in these traditional and modern practices.

Is oral knowledge able to cater to individual idiosyncrasies? Can I hear myself in the Ghanaian oral knowledge system?

Ghana Airways becomes a pursuit for a parlance to communicate my understanding of oral knowledge, using identity as a pivot or metaphor. I hope the episodes demonstrate the beauty and complexity of recording and communicating ideas primarily through sound. On their own, they are artistic products of a modern form of encoding meaning inherent in our sonic communication. The expressions I use are evolved from old ways of being and representing one's self as identifiable cadences.

Ghana Airways is my test of knowledge of self, through a test of oral knowledge of Ghana.

Exploration of Post-colonial Identities

Another way to consider the sonic expression in Ghana Airways is as an exploratory critique of postcolonial identities. In each episode, I offer the listeners a conflicted and amorphous version of my Ghanaian identity as I experience it. I find the national identity lacking and confusing since the expression of this identity – in song, dance, fashion or any other facet of “national culture” excludes many minority ethnic groups like mine.

Ghanaian is a fairly new replacement for various distinct ethnic identities, borne out of a unifying necessity for national cohesion. Just as Nketia explains with the Akan, the modern nation state of Ghana also uses sound as an effective identity-building tool. Anthems, phrases, melodies, and other sonic elements begin to congeal as an encompassing definition of a national sense.

In Ghana Airways I pull apart these sonic elements in search of things in which I can hear myself. My techniques to achieve this include recomposing, rearranging, reproducing and recontextualising national songs as well as writing myself into others. Episode 2, for example, features interpolated versions of modern Ghanaian sonic standards like the Ghana National Anthem and Yen Ara Asaase Ni by Ephraim Amu as statements of my identity.

I translate the anxiety surrounding my perspective of the national identity by altering the performance of the Ghana National Anthem. My version of the National Anthem is distorted, fuzzy and corroded, becoming less anthemic and more moody, pensive, and weighted. I believe this shift in the cadence, tone, and atmosphere in my version of the anthem should evoke the opposite of its intended anthemic, rousing effect.

My approach is purely sculptural. I am interested in the ways in which different distinct parts or things can sit together and resemble a whole. I am interested in the axes, the overlaps and the overlays that emerge from this way of working.

Although the nation-state can manifest itself as a sonic artefact, leveraging the cognitive and affective advantages of sound, I find this assemblage is skewed and biased towards certain majority sentiments.

My version of this assemblage, Ghana Airways, leverages the same advantages of sound as a communication paradigm inviting the listeners to witness the overlaps and overlays that I observe when contrasting what I know about myself, with what the nation-state tells me.

Each episode condenses the conflict of identity into fractured statements sequenced as narrative.

Dynamic Digital Audiences

Ghana Airways is positioned for today’s internet audiences, who, perhaps, enjoy watching producers make lo-fi mixes on Twitch or conversely communicate exclusively via voice notes. My key requirements in considering a concept of the digital audience are the presence of digital technology in listening, making, and distributing sounds, as songs, albums, videos, podcasts, etc., as well as the impact of this technology as a medial interface designed to architect some expected behaviour (like, comment, subscribe, share).

I am interested in the ways in which web-based interaction with oral knowledge, interfaced by recommendation algorithms, for example, shapes the public perception of sound work. Do listeners expect sonic expression to fit platform-specific formats and ideals (track, mix, remix, EP, LP, Podcast, etc)? Can the artist exist between the containers defined by digital sound distribution mechanisms by inventing dramaturgic forms?

Ghana Airways is a proposed challenge to the dynamic digital audience. Structurally it is composited of familiar forms and ways of building dialogue with an audience through composition. It is presented as an esoteric narrative work, somewhere between the precision of conversion and dialogue in podcasts and the commitment and idiosyncratic form inherent in concept albums. Theme development in the episodes is not pyramidal and the subject matter does not simmer to a boil, as one would expect in a more traditional story development structure.

Rather the audience experience is engineered from vertical stack and horizontal layers of dialogue that intersect in a narrative grid. These sonic stacks and layers can be viewed as conceptual representations of different exchanges occurring over the course of my focus on this work, between myself, the subjects emerging from my research and the audience.

I consider each episode as part of a serialised work, sharing certain consistencies that would allow the audience to follow sequenced events featuring changing characters and subjects. I build up scenes and events that share similar structural and thematic threads as a way of consistently transitioning the audience through the different conversations occurring.

For example, certain acoustic instruments are reserved for conjunctions, audio effect chains become a tool for characterisation of voices, using specific equalisation curves and mixing techniques for foregrounding and backgrounding distinct actors/characters in the same scene or the use of drones, field recording and ambiences for highlighting place and context.

I employed the Tannoy sound, a distinct signalling tone used at airports to alert listeners to important announcements, as a pseudo-punctuation across the episodes subtly highlighting shifts in the narrative direction.

In making Ghana Airways, I took the challenge of producing sound work specifically for an online audience as a chance to demonstrate a possible aesthetic experience anchored by an esoteric narrative. I hope that it contrasts with the expectations and behaviour that other forms of digital audio enable. I assume that my intended audience will assemble their own experience of Ghana Airways which would be different from my ideal interaction. However, the critical essence of the work will persist.

Conclusion

This essay highlights some of the persistent ideas expressed in Ghana Airways while ignoring some of the practical and conceptual framings, for example, my approach to web design or the use of writing for a sound-based narrative. Here, the aim is to bring some exposure and clarity to ideas anchoring the work and give the reader insight into my overarching approach to arriving at this form of artistic expression.

The advantage of communicating through sound is its immediacy, which has encouraged me to focus on a concept, feeling, or thought that would otherwise be difficult to convey. The sonic episodes embody my conflict with Ghanaian national identity rather than pondering a resolution or a definitive characterisation of my identity, though hoping to have expressed some of this problematic trope.

“For the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery, and subordination. Artistic expression, expanded beyond recognition from the grudging gifts offered by the masters as a token substitute for freedom from bondage, therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation. Poiesis and poetics begin to coexist in novel forms-autobiographical writing, special and uniquely creative ways of manipulating spoken language, and, above all, the music. All three have overflowed from the containers that the modern nation-state provides for them”

(Gilroy, 1993, p. 50).

References

Nketia, J. H. Kwabena (1982). On the Historicity of Music in African Cultures. Journal of African Studies, 9(3).

Gilroy, Paul. (1993). The black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Edited by Dr Petra Klusmeyer