WHAT SOUNDS DO - New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound
Akvariet, RMC
Eik Skaløes Plads
Kbh K 1437
Danmark
[The conference is now closed for registration. Press the "Tilmeld venteliste /Sign up for waiting list" button]
Sounds are ever present: They continue to envelop and move through you and me in every single moment. But what agencies drive those sounds, what sort of personae are performed, in historical periods as well as today or in the near future? What social relations occur as a result of sound? And how might our embodied experiences and sensibilities create new bodies of knowledge?
To which forms of experiences with our bodies, with objects, within social relations and with peculiar situations and sensibilities might this lead? Which sonic fictions escort us and how do we listen with our sonic corpus?
In this four-day conference between September 13-16, 2022 at Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC) in Copenhagen researchers from the Sound Studies Lab at the University of Copenhagen and international scholars such as Jordan Lacey, and artists like Niels Lynne Løkkegaard invite you to explore these questions of an anthropology of sound.
The conference includes keynote lectures by Salomé Voegelin and Dylan Robinson, research workshops by Jenny Gräf Sheppard, Ania Mauruschat, and Giada Dalla Bontà, sound works and performances as well as roundtable discussions that contribute to the work on an Encyclopedia of Sound Studies, currently conceived by Michael Bull, Holger Schulze, and Jennifer Stoever.
Join the Sound Studies Lab into these sonic experiments of sensing and thinking.
Below you will find the full program as well as the list of contributers and the list of abstracts.
Programme
Chair: Søren Kjærgaard (Copenhagen/DK)
13:30 Holger Schulze (Copenhagen/DK): What is an Anthropology of Sound? Conference Opening
14:00 Salomé Voegelin (London/UK): Sonic Possible and Impossible Bodies: uncurating knowledge
15:00 Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard (Copenhagen/DK): Softening the Piano: Are Instruments Parasitic? Are Instruments Contagious?
16:00 Coffee break
16:30 Dylan Robinson (Kingston/CAN): Indigenous Listening Kinship with Non-Human Relations
17:30 Brief break
17:45 Roundtable discussion: What Forms of Knowledge Are Fostered in Sound Arts? Towards an Encyclopedia of Sound Studies Jennifer Stoever (Binghamton/US), Kristin Moriah (Kingston/CAN), Michael Bull (Brighton/UK), Sanne Krogh Groth (Lund/SWE), Dylan Robinson (Kingston/CAN), Ania Mauruschat (Copenhagen/DK)
Chair: Holger Schulze (Copenhagen/DK)
10:00 Ania Mauruschat (Copenhagen/DK): The Enduring Power of the Qilaat or the Frame Drum as the Key to the Universe
11:00 Public research workshop: Sounding Crisis in Greenland. Sonic Agency in Times of Climate Change (guided by Ania Mauruschat and Dylan Robinson)
12:30 Lunch break
Chair: Vita Zelenska (Regensburg/DE)
14:00 Giada Dalla Bontà (Copenhagen/DK): Sonic Fictions of Cosmism
15:00 Stas Sharifullin (Basel/CH): Becoming-Resonant: Indigenous Sonic Practice in 'the Prison of the Nations'
16:00 Coffee break
16:30 Public research workshop: Vibropolitics. Intermaterial vibrational experience between cultural and relational practices (guided by Giada Dalla Bontà, Vita Zelenska and Stas Sharifullin)
17:30 Brief break
17:45 Roundtable discussion: What Are the Limits of a Political Agency of Sound? With Jennifer Stoever (Binghamton/US), Vita Zelenska (Regensburg/DE), Stas Sharifullin (Basel/CH), Giada Dalla Bontà (Copenhagen, PhD)
19:00 19:00 Martin Daughtry (New York/USA – via Video): What Sounds Do to Wartime Auditors: A Primer for Ukraine
Chair: Jennifer Stoever (Binghamton/US)
10:00 Jenny Gräf Sheppard (Copenhagen/DK): Sonic Orientations: A Practice of Dis-Orienting
11:00 Public research workshop: Corporeal Sensibilities (conceptualized and guided by Jenny Gräf Sheppard, Giada Dalla Bontà – With Salomé Voegelin, Juliana Hodkinson)
12:30 Lunch break
13:30 Ingrid Plum: Corporeality: the Unsounding Body (A116)
15:30 Coffee break
16:00 Sharin Foo & Louise Foo (Copenhagen/DK): Søstr Voicing Spatial Songs (A116)
17:00-19:00 Ambisonic Nights I (at the Ambisonic Chamber of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art): Sound works from artists and composers from Copenhagen and abroad, presented by the Sonic Orientations KUV research project. NOTE: Due to limited seating, reservations will be required. (list of artists to be announced in time)
Chair: Walter Gershon (Glassboro/US)
09:30 Juliana Hodkinson (Berlin/DE): Getting Sounds to Do as They Say: Conversations as Sonic Material
10:30 Jordan Lacey (Melbourne/AUS): Sonic Rupture & the Urban Roar: as told through the meeting of a vital object
11:30 Coffee break
12:00 Kristin Moriah (Kingston/CAN): That Men Might Listen Earnestly To It: Listening, Canonization, and Black Print Culture
13:00 Lunch break
14:30 Søren Kjærgaard (Copenhagen/DK): Traversing Sonic Territories: Towards Diffractive Listening
15:30 Holger Schulze (Copenhagen/DK): Sensologies of a Sonic Vernacular. Conference Closing
16:30 Coffee break (45 minutes)
17:15 Jenny Gräf Sheppard (Copenhagen/DK): The Pidgin Choir. Closing Performance
18:00-20:00 Ambisonic Nights II (at the Ambisonic Chamber of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art): Sound works from artists and composers from Copenhagen and abroad, presented by the Sonic Orientations KUV research project. NOTE: Due to limited seating, reservations will be required. (list of artists to be announced in time)
Funding and collaborations
Conference of the Sound Studies Lab at the University of Copenhagen, Department Arts & Cultural Studies – in collaboration with the Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC), Copenhagen and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (RDAFA), Copenhagen.
Funded by Carlsbergfondet, RMC, and the Department Arts & Cultural Studies, the research clusters Global Entanglements and Art & Earth at the University of Copenhagen.
List of contributors and abstracts
Giada Dalla Bontà is a researcher, curator, and writer focusing on non-official Soviet and post-Soviet art and music; art and politics; underground cultures and experimental music. Postgraduate in Ca’Foscari University of Venice in Russian Cultural Studies, she has won various scholarships and grants from the Moscow NCCA, V-A-C Foundation, Valand Academy - University of Göteborg, and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Throughout her career, she has worked with Lisson Gallery, Mondrian Foundation, HNI Rotterdam, Venice Biennale, and collaborated with independent art projects and experimental music labels. She is currently based in Berlin and in Copenhagen, where she started a PhD fellowship at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies of Copenhagen University in association with the Sound Studies Lab.
Abstract
Sonic Fictions of Cosmism
How did the dissolution of the USSR sound like in the unofficial circles of Russia? How can it inform us about the decline of Soviet ideology and culture and how did it interact with its sociocultural tissue from within the heart of the ‘empire’? The cultural significance of sound practices, together with their concurrent political, artistic and sensorial ones, is analyzed in the specific case of Leningrad art group New Artists, whose activities mockingly reclaimed the legacy of avant gardes since the early ´80s. Progressively including sonic structures of thinking in their activity, the New Artists circle not only presumably initiated rave culture in Soviet Union, but also re-appropriated the myth of cosmism, promoting the creation of a sonic fiction – made of music, dance, art, queer inclusivity– that transcended the Iron Curtain’s borders and conceptually extended to the universe.
Martin Daughtry is an Associate Professor of Music and Sound Studies at New York University. In his writing and teaching he explores themes of acoustic violence; human and nonhuman vocality; listening; Russian-language sung poetry; the auditory imagination; extraterrestrial musicalities; and jazz. His monograph Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford, 2015) received a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers, and the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is a founding member of the Analogue Humanities Archive and Symposium (AHAS), an enigmatic organization that, by design, has no internet footprint. Daughtry is currently writing a book on voice and atmosphere in the Anthropocene.
Abstract
Martin Daughtry: What Sounds Do to Wartime Auditors: A Primer for Ukraine
How do people in combat zones learn to attend to the violent sounds that surround them? Through what interpretive processes do they extract vital tactical information from these sounds? How are they damaged by these sounds, and what tactics do they develop to protect themselves from them? In what way do sounds and violent acts fuse together into new sensory objects (i.e., “sounds” that are more than sounds) that demand new sensory responses?
My presentation today will grapple with these questions, drawing upon a model for understanding wartime audition that I developed within the context of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and its long aftermath. Together, we will discuss the applicability of this model to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. I will suggest that the globalization of modern military technologies and tactics over the course of the long 20th century has resulted in the degradation of many culturally-specific modes of audition, and the creation of a transnational wartime “auditory regime” that people in combat zones around the world must enter in order to survive.
Louise Foo & Sharin Foo a.k.a. SØSTR are an avant-pop duo that consist of sisters Sharin Foo and Louise Foo. Their practise and artistic research collaboration merge together their experiences from Sharin’s background in internationally acclaimed rock duo The Raveonettes, and Louise's practice with interactive sound installations and utilization of new technologies in artistic contexts. Sharin and Louise are part of the faculty at RMC, and are currently working on the artistic research project Voicing Spatial Songs.
Abstract
Since recording technologies became available for wider use approximately 100 years ago, music has for most part been ‘frozen’ in one or two dimensions (mono / stereo). But recent technological advances have now allowed for immersive music to be distributed to a wider audience. Spatialization in music has particularly played a role in electro-acoustic, avant-garde and sound art traditions, but SØSTR are finding that there’s yet to be explored artistic potential with spatialization in popular music and in a songwriting context. In their current artistic research project Voicing Spatial Songs, avant-pop duo SØSTR take up the challenge posed by immersive audio technologies, to produce, create and develop new music and methods for working in this medium. SØSTR will present songs from their eponymous debut originally recorded in stereo and reworked in various immersive audio formats; surround sound 6.1, ambisonics and dolby atmos. Coinciding with the conference, SØSTRs album will be versioned in an audio-visual installation at live music venue VEGA in a cube of 8 speakers and 360 degree visuals.
Walter S. Gershon is Associate Professor of Critical Foundations of Education at Rowan University. His scholarly interests focus on questions of justice, dignity, and access about how people make sense, the sociocultural processes that inform their sensibilities, and the qualitative methodologies used to study educational ecologies. Situated at the intersection of education, social science, and qualitative methodologies, Dr. Gershon’s work often utilizes emerging theoretical and methodological understandings in sensory and sound studies to explore everyday experiences with disenfranchised children and youth. Forthcoming scholarship includes a book on sonic qualitative methods (Routledge) and a genre-defying combination of sounds and text with responding images from Jorge Lucero (MIT Press).
Sanne Krogh Groth is Associate Professor of Musicology and Office Director of the Sound Environment Centre, Lund University. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the online journal Seismograf Peer. She is author of the book Politics and Aesthetics in Electronic Music (Kehrer 2014) and co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (Bloomsbury Academic 2020) and Negotiating Noise (Lund University 2021). She has published internationally and is occasionally curating concerts and exhibitions. Currently, she is conducting field-based research on experimental music and de-colonial aesthetics in Indonesia.
Juliana Hodkinson is Associate Professor in classical and electronic composition at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, chairs the Danish Composers’ Society, and is a jury member of Berlin’s Hauptstadtkulturfonds. With a background in philosophy, musicology, languages and classical music, and an ongoing engagement in cultural politics, Juliana Hodkinson works with sound as a medium of both shared and individual experience. Her work includes four electroacoustic orchestral works, installations and performance pieces, and several major works in hybrid formats, including Angel View, released on col legno records. She has published on topics within re-enactment, collective subjectivities, social resonance within performance projects, and organizational strategies for migrant sonic practices.
Abstract
Juliana Hodkinson: Getting Sounds to Do as They Say Conversations as Sonic Material
Kicking off the final day of this conference, this hour channels the sound of the previous conference days. Taken together, these days may be seen as a grand embodied encounter within a hyper-communicative environment of sound-making and listening. By way of introduction, I will give some context from within my own and others’ related sonic practices, focusing on the mechanics by which imagination and conceptualization operate in parallel with concrete sonic actions that may be the result of both sensory-motoric control and absolute contingency. More specifically, this talk aims to attune to how sounds behave in conversation, using examples from current significant conversations in the public sphere, as well as discussions arising during this conference. Actively blending formats and mechanisms of academic and public discussion, social composition, recording, reenactment and polyphony, the talk will take these current acts of listening and talking as material to be explored (amplified, prolonged, edited, looped, and so on) ‘as we speak’, leaving open the question of how the conversation is then impacted by this exploration.
Søren Kjærgaard is a Copenhagen-based pianist, composer, improviser, educator and artistic researcher. His work orients across a variety of settings and has led to international collaborations, performances, lectures, commissions and a growing discography of album releases. Since 2015, Søren Kjærgaard has been associate professor at Rhythmic Music Conservatory, and currently he is also vice principal and head of research and development at RMC. In his artistic research, Kjærgaard investigates the trans/interference of sonic identity through sampling and digital code, and how to engage with this practice in live improvisation and approaches of listening.
Abstract
Søren Kjærgaard: Traversing Sonic Territories: Toward a practice of diffractive listening
What happens when musicians who are improvising on acoustic instruments sample and exchange their sound libraries? How can such a transgression of sonic territories contribute to an expanded understanding of one’s own sonic identity? And could this b/lending of sonic identities point to a more ambiguous yet vibrant field of intra-play? The artistic research project “Traversing Sonic Territories” investigates these effects of sharing personal sound libraries on one’s musical horizon. This contribution shows how artists attempt to transgress their habitual boundaries for unfamiliar possibilities to act and to imagine music to a point where individual approaches are challenged, where authorship and origin, even the conventionalized use of instruments is destabilized. Through this process the boundaries of their sonic identity are apparently questioned – including physical dispositions, instrumental in/capacities, mimetic patterning, aesthetic preferences and other un/conscious biases. In this research project we ask: How can we further develop this critical approach to listening that enables us to hear through the cracks and breaches of these boundaries? Could we engage in this process with others toward a practice of a more diffractive listening – by carefully listening for insights through one another?
Jordan Lacey is a sonic thinker/practitioner, artistic researcher and speculative design studio tutor in the School of Design at RMIT University. Much of his work is concerned with binding sonic practices with vitalist flat ontologies. His two books Sonic Rupture (SR) and Urban Roar (UR) rethink acoustic ecology with affect theory and sound-art installation practices (SR), and apply psychophysical approaches to the reimagining of relationships between artistic bodies, expressive environments, and the generative waves of the psyche (UR). He is associate editor, and lead book reviewer, of the Journal of Sonic Studies. A comprehensive list of his theoretical and practical contributions to sounds studies and soundscape design practices can be found at: jordan-lacey.com.
Abstract
Jordan Lacey: Sonic Rupture & the Urban Roar: as Told Through the Meeting of a Vital Object
This vital object is a story of flow. It begins with an event (in 1999) when I was passed a long, smooth Mallee branch called a Warilyu (Sturt Creek Mallee) by the head-teacher of Lajamanu school (central Australia) with the words, “you’ll need this to keep the dogs away”. This was the first part of an assemblage – the becoming of a vital object – that took form over the next ten years. I maintain an ongoing sense that the object came to life of its own accord, sharing my body as a vital interconnect for its own emergence. I take this opportunity to unpack this process in relationship to contemporary theories explored in sound studies and vital ontologies. In the Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2020), Holger Schulze brings attention to the value of idiosyncratic practices and autoethnographic reflection, in sonic research. Indeed, this vital object is imbued with mnemonic sounds that express cultural, environmental and personal histories/stories. I consider its actualisation, and more-than-human presence, in relationship to Jane Bennet’s vital materialism and the omnipresent life-force of Rosi Braidotti’s zoë. I consider this vital object to be a singularity that ruptures; producing a prehensive force connecting the imaginative subject with those expressive affects roaring beneath the weight of urban life.
Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard is Associate Professor at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen and head of Institute of Imaginary Sound -a virtual sub department at RMC
Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard works with both physical and imaginary sound and various other non-sonic media. He considers his work to be a basic research in realities and is interested in how bubble-like systems unfold themselves as human conditions.
The meetings between the individual body and these different bubble-like systems are key drivers in Løkkegaards praxis and he's interested in how to escape these bubbles, and if not escape them, then how they can be warped, wrestled and renegotiated.
In his artistic research Løkkegaard is interested in western musical instruments, not only as sources of sound but also as cultural markers embedded within different systems and hierarchies. He considers these instruments as critical and even dangerous sites that should be approached with the greatest caution; as loaded interfaces - not only between mechanical movement and the production of sound, between phantasms and physical reality but also as contaminated places that should be treated as such.
Abstract
Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard: Softening the Piano: Are Instruments Parasitic? Are Instruments Contagious?
I´m interested in Western musical instruments as being critical and even dangerous sites that should be approached with the greatest caution; as loaded interfaces - not only between mechanical movement and the production of sound, between phantasms and physical reality but also as contaminated places that should be treated as such. Infected places of parasitic discourse ready to jump at you and embed themselves in you. How can we soften these sedimented parasitic layers within the instruments yet silent and invisible to the eye?
Ania Mauruschat is a German Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoc Fellow within the Horizon Europe programme of the European Commission at the Sound Studies Lab of the University of Copenhagen. Her research project "Sounding Crisis. Sounds and Energies within Climate Change" (09/2021 - 08/2023) researches indigenous and non-indigenous sound practices of activists and artists addressing the human-nature relationship in times of climate crisis in Denmark, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and Australia. Before switching to academia, she worked for over ten years for public radio in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
Abstract
Ania Mauruschat: The Enduring Power of the Qilaat or the Frame Drum as the Key to the Universe
For over 4000 years, the Inuit have been living in an intimate relationship with nature in the Arctic, one of the harshest climates on earth. Their knowledge about surviving under such conditions has been preserved and passed on over the millennia through their oral tradition of myth and song. Despite the interruptions of the more than 300 years of colonization Indigenous Knowledge has been passed on and activated more and more in recent years. A crucial role in the process of decolonization in Greenland plays the revitalization of the qilaat. This frame drum tradition had been banned by colonizers like Hans Egede 300 years ago from the church. Nevertheless, recently the qilaat has been listed as a UNESCO world heritage. Still, despite this colossal acknowledgment, the priest Markus E. Olsen lately got fired because he had the qilaat played on June 21, 2022, the 37th national holiday of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), at church in Nuuk against the will of the bishop of Greenland. This critical audio paper tries to capture the enduring power and everlasting meaning of the qilaat for the people of Kalaallit Nunaat.
Kristin Moriah is an Assistant Professor of English at Queen’s University and a 2022 Visiting Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Center for Black Digital Research and the Pennsylvania State Humanities Institute. Her research interests include Sound Studies and black feminist performance, particularly the circulation of African American performance within the black diaspora and its influence on the formation of national identity. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Harry Ransom Center.
Abstract
Kristin Moriah: “That Men Might Listen Earnestly To It”: Hearing Blackness
Listening to Black culture and Black music is so ubiquitous that the act of listening to Blackness can seem facile and its nuances can go unnoticed. But listening to Blackness entails forms of critical apprehension that carry different valences across different frequencies. “Listen” can be a command, an invocation, or a plea. In progressive political discourses about anti-racism and anti-Blackness, we are asked to listen for sounds that go unnoticed by others; to listen for dissonance; to listen to music; to listen to protest; to listen for signs of life. And yet, there is still so much to be said about Black sonic phenomena, like the way “I Can’t Breathe,” Eric Garner’s last words, are now the title of an R &B song and a protest chant. Thus, the complex and shifting meaning of Black sounds and occasions to listen to Black culture pose significant critical challenges. At the same time, the misapprehension of Black sounds and sonic forms carries profound consequences and can contribute to enduring forms of subjection. Here, I am thinking of the way Matthew Morrison uses the term “Blacksound” to refer to “the legacies, sounds, and movements of African American bodies – both real and imagined – on which blackface performance and popular entertainment was based” (18) and finds copious examples of Blacksound in the present. Or the way Jennifer Stoever argues that beginning in the nineteenth century, racist listening practices offered “white elites a new method of grounding racial abjection in the body while cultivating white listening practices as critical, discerning, delicate and, above all, as the standard of citizenship and personhood (5). Following Kevin Quashie, given that being “heard” can also be fraught with danger, and that certain aspects of Black vernacular culture flourish outside of the range of dominant culture, I am struck by the way inaudibility, or sonic inscrutability emerges as a significant aspect of Black sounding worlds and Black literature, where listening is often related to the struggle to sound or to be heard correctly, even while retaining autonomy and privacy. I note that the struggle to sound publicly, and to be perceived accurately, forms the bedrock of Black literature in North America and creates a bridge to literature across the Black diaspora.
Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw artist, curator and writer from the Stó:lō First Nations community of Skwah. From 2015-2022 he was the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. This Fall he began a new appointment as Associate Professor in the School of Music at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Robinson’s work spans the areas of Indigenous sound studies and public art, and takes various forms including event scores, autotheory, gatherings, and inter-arts creation. This range of forms offers a space to integrate the sonic, visual, poetic and material that are often integrated in Stó:lō cultural work. His book, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University Minnesota Press, 2020), examines Indigenous and settler colonial listening practices.
Abstract
Dylan Robinson: Indigenous Listening Kinship with Non-Human Relations
Indigenous people continue to contend with Western ontologies that have come to define the boundaries of life and being. We contend with them externally—through conversations with museums, in educational contexts, and with government policy of the settler state—and at times we contend among ourselves with the absence of knowledge that has resulted from the long-term, explicit attempts to erase our varied practices of relation with non-human beings through colonial education and government policy. We contend with the words animism and fetishization that arose out of others’ attempts to comprehend how Indigenous ontologies affirm life as it lives variously in spoken word, stones, skies, land, and the materiality of the world. Our songs also hold life, but although many refer to “the heartbeat of the drum”, Indigenous songs do not live as humans live. Through ethnographic recording held by museums, our songs continue to live. While returning songs and other ancestors to our communities is one important aspect of redress, a different kind of work is required to reconnect kinship with the more-than human life of Indigenous song and land. Here, artwork by Peter Morin (Tahltan) and Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe) foster reconnection and center Indigenous listening kinship.
Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research moves between a cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture and the anthropology of media. He was visiting professor at the Musashino Art University Tokyo, at the University of New South Wales Sydney, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He produced radio features for Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and collaborated with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. He writes for Merkur, Seismograf, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Positionen. Publications include: Sonic Fiction (2020), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (2020, co-ed.), The Sonic Persona (2018).
Abstract
Holger Schulze: What is an Anthropology of Sound? Conference Opening
“Everyday observations, reflections, interpretations and judgements should not simply be dismissed: It is the task of anthropology to account for them when forming its own theories, and to integrate them into an academic context.” (Gebauer and Wulf 2009: 181) With this conference, we pick up and scatter small grains of new thought that might lie next to habitual seeds. The artists and researchers contributing wish to find a direction past the paths that prior arts and research have taken. Bringing together “[t]hose of us who are unable to reconcile ourselves to our existence. Those of us whose dissatisfaction and disaffection, whose discontent and whose anger and whose despair overwhelms them and exceeds them … drawn together by the impulse to fashion a vocabulary. By a target. By a yearning. By an imperative to consent—in the words of Fred Moten quoting the words of Édouard Glissant—not to be a single being.” (Eshun 2018: 15:02–16:02)
Abstract
Holger Schulze: Sensologies of a Sonic Vernacular. Conference Closing
What can a sonic vernacular be? In early 21st century research as well as in artistic and everyday practice, the sonic assumes a new role. In this conference sounds served as vessels and as entry points, as objects as well as tools of critique or canonization, as monstrous or even alien beings, as political agents and as symptoms and documentations of ruptures and roars. How can one recognize in this multitude of explorations and exemplifications of the sonic a somewhat coherent vernacular? This contribution to the closing of this conference intends to propose an outline of the approaches to working artistically and scholarly with and through sound that we could experience, enjoy and thinking with in the past days. What are the sensologies within sound art and sound studies -- and what sonic vernacular is emerging from them?
Stas Sharifullin is a Bashkir/Russian, Siberian-born researcher and artist working with sound and contexts of the sonic. He is currently a guest lecturer at the Sound Studies and Sonic Arts M.A. at Berlin University of the Arts. His ongoing research examines the potential of sonic agency, e.g. how sound and music operate in contexts of political activism and resistance practices, addressing the variation in inequality across authoritarian regimes and unbalanced power dynamics under late capitalism.
Abstract
Stas Sharifullin: Becoming-Resonant: Indigenous Sonic Practice in 'the Prison of the Nations'
Throat singing, epic poetry and other sonic practices of Russia's indigenous peoples have been preserved under the centuries of oppression—from the tsarist settler colonialism and aggressive military expansion to communists' quasi-decolonial experiment and beyond. Focused on the intersubjective experience between human and sound, some of these practices tend to transform the performer's body into a non-static, transcorporeal sonic object (hence the Deleuzian 'becoming') which is revealed differently under the different listening positionalities. In contrast to 'the Western' dissection between composers and performers, some of these 'exercises in de-alienation' are inseparable from the artists' bodies and minds, deeply rooted in tradition and challenging the notions of ego, domination and power.
Jenny Gräf Sheppard did her BA at Hampshire College, Amherst/MA and subsequently her MFA in Time Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago/IL. Her PhD project »Communicating Vessels: Re-defining Agency through Sounding« (2020-2023) contains theoretical and practice-based research in which she explores agency from different perspectives using the concept of 'Sounding'. Sounding proposes a porosity in distinctions between listening and producing sound, re-framing sonic relationships and revealing potential and existing interacting agencies. 2016- 2020 she worked as associate professor at Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi and served as head of the Laboratory for Sound.
Abstract
Jenny Gräf Sheppard: Sonic Orientations: A Practice of Dis-Orienting
Sound has the capacity to orient us in time, space and in relation to our ecosystems in which we are situated. This talk presents the idea of sonic orientation and, within it, practices of sounding that dis-orient in ways that offer transformative potentials. What new ecologies, subjectivities and reciprocities are formed by sonic dis-orientation? Addressing on the one hand Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practices that re-orient the listener through sensorial, perceptual and cognitive shifts on the one side, and on the other hand the collaborative Ambisonics immersive research project in which I explored ideas on Western constructs of subjectivity, dis-orientation is considered in this talk as a condition for re-connecting with our situated knowledges and for an ever-changing fluid state of being.
Ingrid Plum (London, UK) is an artist and composer who uses her voice with extended technique, improvisation, field recordings, percussion and electronics. Described by The Guardian as “gorgeously atmospheric vocal techniques woven around field recordings & electronics” she has performed and exhibited internationally since 2002, creating work that combines Film, Folk Music and Sound Art. Plum is a student of Meredith Monk, and is a Lecturer in BA (Hons) Sound Arts at London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London. She is currently Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, UoL and her recent film works on pandemic listening practices have contributed to the Auraldiversities series at the Sound Practice Research Centre at Goldsmiths. Her work has been featured in The Quietus, reviewed by The Wire, played by Late Junction and Unclassified on BBC Radio 3, and performed live in session at Maida Vale Studios. Plum was commissioned for International Women’s Day 2019 by The Verb and was interviewed for the New Weird Britain series for BBC Radio 4.
Abstract
Ingrid Plum Corporeality: the Unsounding Body
Ingrid Plum’s Corporeality demands that you listen louder. Plum will present tracks from this new album through a journey of archival research and sonic embodiment. Corporeality draws on the archive of sound poet Lily Greenham, and utilises shimmering sine-tone structures, intensely-grounded field recordings, and the interior of a grand piano to explore spaces amongst the oscillating layers of sound. At the core is Plum’s voice and the unique circuitry of the EMS VCS4 synthesiser. Both vessels have been coaxed into sound production through the embodiment of listening practices. Plum weaves these elements together into embodied, intimate compositions that get under your skin and activate an interior landscape of listening.
Jennifer Lynn Stoever is co-founder and Editor in Chief of Sounding Out! and Associate Professor at SUNY Binghamton, where teaches courses on African American literature, sound studies, and race and gender representation in popular music. She has published in Social Text, Social Identities, Sound Effects, Modernist Cultures, American Quarterly and Radical History Review among others; her most recent research, “Origin Stories: Race, Silence, and What We Call ‘Sound Art’” appeared in in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art (2021). She is the author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press).
Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer who works with sound’s relational capacity to develop different and plural knowledge possibilities. She writes essays and text-scores for performance and publication. Books include Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), The Political Possibility of Sound (2018) and Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/ 2021). Her forthcoming book Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands (2023) foregrounds the perfidy of norms and considers the violence of contemporary art. Voegelin is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. www.salomevoegelin.net, www.listeningacrossdisciplines.net, www.soundwords.tumblr.com, @soundwords_sv
Abstract
Salomé Voegelin: Sonic Possible and Impossible Bodies: uncurating knowledge
Walking on pavements while avoiding to stand on the gaps between paving slabs is a game. It is a playful participation in the design of the civic infrastructure. But it is also an attempt to find a rhythm and a voice within or against that very infrastructure. To resist its lines by moving against their design: performing the body and what it touches, what rhythms it makes; and performing the environment, what shape it takes by how I move within it. In this talk I want to engage in this game between lines and bodies and knowledge to understand how things are organised and how these organisations are political, and exclusionary, a matter of power and violence, as a violence done to how we move, and look, and listen together or alone. Thus I want to stress the connection between knowledge and curation. To query the self-evidence and apparent neutrality of how knowledge is displayed and legitimized, and from there to rethink curating through ‘uncurating’, as scrutinizing and undoing historical and economic lines of thought. Whereby the ‘un’ does not express a rejection. It does not articulate ‘not curating’ as in not making accessible and thinkable what we see and hear, but invites to consider the curatorial as providing access to and pluralizing what can be thought and known, and in a different way.
Vita Zelenska (born in Vinnytsia, Ukraine) is an anthropologist, curator, and artist working in the spheres of political anthropology, anthropology of sound, anthropology of art, and sound studies. At the moment they are a doctoral candidate at the Leibniz ScienceCampus Regensburg. They are writing about knowledge production/knowledge making as related to the topic of migration in Greece and the USA, including sonic knowledge. Graduated from the European University at Saint Petersburg in 2016, majoring in cultural anthropology (MA). Co-curated “Vslukh” (En. “Out Loud: A Study of Sound”) educational program at the New Holland Island (Saint Petersburg) in 2018. As an artist, they have been exploring experimental collective sonic and textual production (Work Hard! Play Hard! in Minsk, 2019, 2020; SIEF Congress 2021, EASA Conference 2022).