Case-Specific Electroacoustic Systems
(2022)
author(s): Alejandro Montes de Oca
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This composition-based project of artistic research introduces the term Case-Specific Electroacoustic Systems to describe a set of electric, digital, and acoustic devices that are interconnected in a particular way to embody a specific sound work. The artistic research states that when the sound composition process occurs in tandem with the electroacoustic system configuration and design process, a particular creative practice is engendered. The main research questions are how the development of such a system becomes another parameter of sound creation, and how this influences the artistic ideas and process elaborated around a specific sound work. In the course of the doctoral trajectory five new sound works were created and presented, thus forming the artistic portfolio of this doctoral project. Each work included the composition, design, and creation of a case-specific electroacoustic system. An introduction to the concept of Case-Specific Electroacoustic Systems, its contextualisation, and an analysis of the artistic practice and the outcomes of each of the five artworks are presented in this written thesis. The complete scope of this doctoral project, including the media material of the artistic portfolio and this artistic doctoral thesis, is contained within the exposition Case-Specific Electroacoustic Systems, published and archived in the Research Catalogue online database.
Dialectics of Outside and Inside - A Sonic Study of Being through Illness and Isolation
(2021)
author(s): Mariske Broeckmeyer
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay and audio piece explore how the related experiences of illness and isolation problematize the clear spatial opposition of “outside” and “inside.” Adopting the dialectical models, proposed by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his phenomenological study of outside and inside, I aspire to take aural notice on how the migraine sufferer’s sense of space shifts in sync with her sense of self throughout a migraine attack. Composed out of vocal sounds and domestic noises, recorded in and around the house, this piece merges the materiality of the room and voice in a conversation that balances on the edges of meaning. Juxtaposing one unto the other, both self and space get lost in displacement, matter melts and disappears into one roaring drone.
Addressing the Mapping Problem in Sonic Information Design through Embodied Image Schemata, Conceptual Metaphors, and Conceptual Blending
(2019)
author(s): Stephen Roddy
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article explores the mapping problem in parameter mapping sonification: the problem of how to map data to sound in a way that conveys meaning to the listener. We contend that this problem can be addressed by considering the implied conceptual framing of data–to–sound mapping strategies with a particular focus on how such frameworks may be informed by embodied cognition research and theories of conceptual metaphor. To this end, we discuss two examples of data-driven musical pieces which are informed by models from embodied cognition, followed by a more detailed case study of a sonic information design mapping strategy for a large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) network.
Sonic Information Design for the Display of Proteomic Data
(2018)
author(s): William L. Martens
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
A research project focusing on the sonification of proteomic data distributions provided the context for the current study of sonic information design, which was guided by multiple criteria emphasizing practical use as well as aesthetics. For this case, the auditory display of those sonifications would be judged useful if they were to enable listeners to hear differences in proteomic data associated with three different types of cells, one of which exhibited the neuropathology associated with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
A primary concern was to ensure that meaningful patterns in the data would not be lost as the data were transformed into sound, and so three different data sonifications were designed, each of which attempted to capitalize upon human auditory capacities that complement the visual capacities engaged by more conventional graphic representations. One of the data sonifications was based upon the hypothesis that auditory sensitivity to regularities and irregularities in spatio-temporal patterns in the data could be heard through spatial distribution of sonic components. The design of a second sonification was based upon the hypothesis that variation in timbre of non-spatialized components might create a distinguishable sound for each of three types of cells. A third sonification was based upon the hypothesis that redundant variation in both timbral and spatial features of sonic components would be even more powerful as a means for identifying spatio-temporal patterns in the dynamic, multidimensional data generated in modern proteomic studies of ALS. This paper will focus upon the sound processing underlying the alternative sonifications that were examined in this case study of sonic information design.
Editorial: On Sonic Information Design
(2018)
author(s): Stephen Barrass
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Sonic Information Design refers to the design of sounds to provide useful information in applications that have impact in our daily lives. The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Sound Studies on Sonic Information Design had their origins as responses to the theme of the 22nd International Conference for Auditory Display, held in Canberra, Australia in 2016.
Not at Home: The Uncanny Experiences of Radio Home Run
(2018)
author(s): Heather Contant
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this paper, I attempt to better understand the Japanese media artist Tetsuo Kogawa’s concept of radioart by examining the relationship of this concept to movement. To do this, I focus on the Japanese term ika, which can be used to describe the uncanny feeling that results from aesthetic strategies, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s artistic techniques of defamiliarization or Bertolt Brecht’s alienating tactics of Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt). Discussions of ika not only circulated through and around the intellectual and artistic communities that Kogawa participated in during the 1970s and 1980s, they also influenced the practices of the very low-powered FM radio stations, Radio Polybucket and Radio Home Run, established by Kogawa’s students in the early 1980s. By discussing the emphasis of ika and physical movement in Radio Polybucket’s and Radio Home Run’s practices, I begin to trace a central element in Kogawa’s concept of radioart, which I call a kinetic interaction with the material conditions of radio. Through this kinetic interaction, Kogawa makes the material aspects of radio phenomena—its technology, its electromagnetic waves, and its sonic content—perceptible in a new way and thereby reveals previously hidden possibilities.
Materials of Sound: Sound As (More Than) Sound
(2018)
author(s): Caleb Kelly
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
By examining the materials that produce sound within contemporary art, we can approach sounding works not only from the perspective of “sound as sound” or “sound in itself” but rather as “sound as more than sound.” Sound can never be without a history, culture, or political situation, and by approaching sounding practices in the same manner as we critically approach contemporary art practices, we allow matter to matter.
“Step by Step” Reading and Re-writing Urban Space Through the Footstep
(2018)
author(s): Elena Biserna
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper explores the materiality of sound by focusing on the interaction between the walker and urban space established by the most “basic” form of soundmaking on the move – the sound of our footsteps. It considers the presence of footprints and empreintes in the contemporary arts and surveys a series of projects by artists and composers – Peter Ablinger, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, katrinem, Dennis Oppenheim, and Jessica Thompson – highlighting the interplay between body and site established through the footsteps. By drawing on an interdisciplinary body of literature on city walking and on sound studies, I consider the step as the fundamental bodily contact with the environment while walking as well as a sound signal that generates a sense of presence, activates the surroundings, and locates us in space. Therefore, I interpret the footstep as a primary auditory event, allowing us to “read and rewrite” (Augoyard 2007) urban soundscapes, to explore and perceive – but also to reshape and participate in – acoustic spaces, establishing a material, embodied, situated, and mutual relationship with our context.
Traumatic Ruins and The Archeology of Sound: William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops
(2018)
author(s): Lindsay Balfour
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper traces the relationship between art and atrocity, materiality and decay, and the aural possibilities of hospitality in a time of terror. There is one site in particular that seems to speak so poignantly to the complex workings of trauma, ruin, and memory, and it is the use of sound in this place that I wish to draw attention to here. The September 11 Memorial and Museum may not appear, at first, to signal the ways in which sound might usher in a new way of thinking about the philosophically complex concept of hospitality nor the promises of decay. Yet, one installation in particular manages to do just that. Located in the Museum’s Historical Exhibition, and evocative of death, mourning, and haunting, William Basinski’s sound and video installation, The Disintegration Loops, offers a fitting yet unique elegy to the loss of the towers and nearly 3,000 innocent people. Additionally, this work also carries within itself far more: layers of meaning and spectral traces that are often missed during singular visits by museum guests and that recall aspects of memory and materiality crucial to the question of what it means to live alongside others. I want to suggest that, while existing as a differentiated work in its own right, it is through its in-situ role – a ruin in a place of ruins – that The Disintegration Loops recalls one of the most complex and contradictory paradigms for thinking about loss and for mourning alongside strangers. It initiates, I argue, a philosophy of hospitality that is, defined in this context, uniquely preoccupied with ideas of strangers, belonging, home, and homelessness and an ethics concerned with “das Unheimliche” or something odd that is not quite at home yet nonetheless present in that space. In this paper I will discuss the significance of Basinski’s work to aural and material memory and explore the concepts of ruins and dust to arrive at one of hospitality’s most startling and uncanny figures, a figure of autoimmunity that is powerfully raised in Basinski’s work, making it one of the most compelling pieces of art in the Museum.
The Cave and Church in Tomba Emmanuelle. Some Notes on the Ritual Use of Room Acoustics.
(2017)
author(s): Petter Snekkestad
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article explores the acoustics of the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum through an associative history of reverberation. In particular, the sensory combination of reverberation and the fresco Vita in the darkened mausoleum echoes that of sound experiences in painted prehistoric caves and medieval churches. I will also touch upon the notion of demarcation as a third ritual effect in these spaces.
The Secret Theatre Revisited: Eavesdropping on Locative Media Performances
(2017)
author(s): Pieter Verstraete
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
With the proliferation of the iPod and related audio mobile technologies in our daily experiences, Shuhei Hosokawa’s “The Walkman Effect” (1984) gains new significance. While exploring the locative aspects of these technologies for media art, I elaborate on Hosokawa’s idea of a “secret theatre” by paralleling it to some compelling concepts in audio (culture) studies, such as Michael Bull’s “auditized looking,” Elisabeth Weis’ “écouterism,” Denis Hollier/Jean Paul Sartre’s “auditory gaze,” and Steven Connor’s “modern auditory I.” As case studies, I focus on three performative audio walks that all took place in train stations around 2012-2013: Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof, Dries Verhoeven’s Niemandsland, and Judith Hoffland’s Like Me. Each in their own right reconfigures the urban experience by means of locative features and interactive relations with their environments. These art works help to see Hosokawa’s “secret theatre” in a new light of highly individualized yet relational aesthetic experiences that open our ears and eyes to an outside social context and reality rather than shut them off.
The Relationality of the Adhaan: A Reading of the Islamic Call to Prayer Through Adriana Cavarero’s Philosophy of Vocal Expression
(2017)
author(s): Lutfi Othman
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The Call to Prayer, the Adhaan, is one of the most instantly recognizable Islamic sounds that we might hear in our soundscape today. For Muslims, the Adhaan is a specific call to notify the Islamic community that the time for prayer has arrived. For those who are not trained to respond to it religiously, the experience of listening to the Adhaan can trigger the formation of different interpretations, sometimes in hostile ways, from its original intent. This paper looks at the Adhaan from the perspective of sound and suggests that the voice of the Mu’adhin, who calls for prayer, carries with it the possibility to be perceived in manifold ways. Through the sound of the human voice and its pervasive nature, the Adhaan carries its original message, fusing it with new meanings, and announces it in a way unique to the voice. Guided by philosopher Ariana Cavarero’s conception of the voice and referencing situations in The United States of America where the Adhaan was at the center of controversy, this paper approaches the Adhaan with a focus on the sound of the voice and the relations that it fosters both intentionally and unintentionally.
The sounds of food: Defamiliarization and the blinding of taste
(2017)
author(s): Tara Brabazon
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay – situated within the small but emerging field of sonic food studies and gastronomic auditory cultures – is positioned in the gap between the sounds of food and the meanings derived from the behaviors and practices encircling food. In food studies literature, assumptions abound about multi-sensory engagement. Yet, the sonic components of food remain undertheorized. This sonic research article – consisting of an sonic artifact and exegesis – emphasizes and prioritizes sensory incongruity. Intentionally, the non-eating sounds of the digital and analogue interactions surrounding food are summoned. There is a reason for the focus on these interfaces. Working with Viktor Shklovsky’s theorization of defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение), presented in his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” I am interested in reducing “automatization” and value “disruptions.” I have produced a sonic artifact that textualizes three slices of food sound: shopping for groceries, the delivery of food to a domicile, and cooking. These sounds were not slotted into a convenient narrative of a sonic documentary. They were not staged; they were not sound effects. There is a gap – of experience, expertise, perception, and meaning – between signifier and signified, the sound and its reception. The deferral of meaning creates hesitation, confusion, instability, and unsettles meaning systems.
“City Noise”: Sound (Art) and Disaster
(2017)
author(s): Frans Ari Prasetyo
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
My sonic work “City Noise” proposes both an artistic and a theoretical approach to the city-sound relationship. The default assumption about this relationship is that sounds reflect a one-to-one relationship between soundscape and landscape, both drawing upon and revealing the physical and social landscapes from which they originate. However, the question can be posed regarding whether there actually is a direct relationship between sound and place in our increasingly globalized world. Due to this globalization, the relation between the local and the global has become more fluid, and the relation between sounds and scapes has begun to blur.
“You can hear them before you see them” Listening through Belfast segregated neighborhoods
(2017)
author(s): Nicola Di Croce
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The present research explores urban segregation in Belfast through listening. Specifically, the aim is to investigate how auditory culture subtly and deeply affects everyday lives and how marginal areas can be identified and analyzed from an auditory perspective. Moreover, the paper highlights the strong relationship between everyday sonic environments, certain urban and social issues, and the system of public policies related to the preceding. Therefore, urban planning and public policy design are investigated through a sonic studies approach in order to reveal the political framework of the city.
The sonic environment of Belfast’s most segregated areas is characterized by ice cream van melodies and their propagation within different neighborhoods. Such a street trade, which is also spread over Great Britain and Ireland, represents the perfect opportunity to enter areas that are often difficult to approach.
The case study shows how a study of the production and reception of the moving melodies emanating from ice cream vans is crucial in detecting where and how Belfast's contemporary culture is developing and in what ways sonic studies may influence a new wave of inclusion policies. The sounds of ice cream vans and their dissemination can be investigated to both confirm and challenge Belfast’s segregation trend; understanding them offers practitioners and dwellers an unexplored “sonic tool” to discuss segregation.
Silencing Urban Exhalations: a case study of student-led soundscape design
(2017)
author(s): Jordan Lacey
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper describes a practice-led soundscape studies project in which students created sound interventions to transform the “voice of the city.” A loud exhaust fan outlet dominated the site, and students were asked to create a soundscape intervention in response to an imaginative-artistic question: the exhaust outlet is the voice of the city, speaking; can this voice be deciphered, transformed, augmented? Students responded with live sound-art, musical and electroacoustic performances played through loudspeakers placed adjacent to the exhaust outlet, and physical changes to the environment with interactive sound-making artifacts. The intervention was informed by the acoustic ecology movement’s maxim that acoustic design and the “retrieval of a significant aural culture” is a “task for everyone” (Schafer 1977: 206); thus, students were encouraged to listen and creatively respond to the dominant sound. Students were introduced to a mixture of acoustic ecology listening exercises and structural approaches derived from the Research Centre on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment (CRESSON). The project aimed to demonstrate that with the assistance of educational resources, city dwellers, given the opportunity to creatively interact with city sounds, might revitalize their own city-relationship through participatory soundscape design.
Noise as “sound out of place”: investigating the links between Mary Douglas’ work on dirt and sound studies research
(2017)
author(s): Hugh Pickering, Tom Rice
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
“Noise” is an important subject in sound studies research. However, due in large part to the fact that judgements about what constitutes noise are highly subjective, researchers have often struggled to define it. Where attempts have been made, many have settled on a definition of noise as “sound out of place,” a reformulation of Mary Douglas’ definition of “dirt” as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966: 44). Beyond this, however, no effort has been directed towards exploring the link between dirt and noise or seeing how far the analogy between the two extends. This article corrects this omission by undertaking a close reading of Douglas’ writing on “dirt” and linking it to contemporary sound studies research. It argues that far more than simply giving rise to the definition “sound out of place,” Douglas’ classic anthropological work can be used as the basis for an integrated “theory of noise,” deepening our understanding of what it means when we describe a sound as “noise” and drawing attention to the ambiguous, transgressive and dangerous qualities and potentials of noise.
Smorzando. Chopin on the MP3 player
(2017)
author(s): Michel Roth
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
My article focuses on the phenomenon of the ephemeral in music in general. I would like to stay with piano music for a while, where the rapid fading away of tone is normal, and a central component for the regulation of this process, the damper, is called il smorzatore in Italian. The Préludes Op. 28 by Frédéric Chopin will serve as one example; I will later move on to a piano LP by the Swiss artist Dieter Roth and will end with an orchestral work by the young German composer Hannes Seidl.
Listening to the Body Moving: Auscultation, Sound, and Music in the Early Nineteenth Century
(2017)
author(s): Janina Wellmann
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper explores the sounds of the body in an era before sound could be recorded as sound, the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the French physician René Théophile Laennec’s study of cardiac disease and in particular his use of auscultation, it asks how the early nineteenth century conceived of a sounding living body, specifically how auscultation and body sounds produced new knowledge about the body, health, and disease. I show that Laennec thought of the body and the heart in terms of a musical instrument, and argue that the limits to auscultation’s diagnostic power lay not so much in its inability fully to explain disease as in Laennec’s analogy of body and musical instrument, medical understanding and musical skill. This soon gave way to a new understanding and soundscape of the body, as nineteenth-century physiologists investigated the body with instruments that could penetrate the body ever more deeply.
Record, Rewind, Rewrite. Acoustic Historiography with the Presidential Tapes
(2017)
author(s): Monika Dommann
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
A tool of audio manipulation available to all (recording, fast-forwarding and rewinding, dictating, deleting, overwriting, etc.), tape recorders became a universal feature of offices and living rooms in the 1950s. Between 1962 (when John F. Kennedy installed a secret recording system in his Oval Office) and July 1973 (when Richard Nixon’s extensive recording system was revealed in the aftermath of Watergate and switched off on 18 July) (Haldeman 1988: 86), taping was even used by American presidents as a secret memo technique. From the perspective of the history of knowledge and media studies, this article examines the explosive political force of sidestepping the ephemerality of verbal communication through the secret tape recordings, historical and archival examinations of the Presidential Tapes and their remixes in Public History and film projects, where communicative acts once concealed from the public now continue as endless media loops. A paradoxical form of acoustic nostalgia emerges here: It tackles the problem of invisible power and ritualised politics with a sensorially-accessible “presence” and acoustically-perceptible corporeality – drawing on media in the process. The plea for acoustic historiography developed in this article is an examination of the soundscapes previously neglected by historiography but augmented by media history. While historiography, up to the 20th century, could record the sounds, tones and voices of the past only through writing, the Soundscape Projects initiated by R. Murray Schafer since the 1970s used tape to store and document sound and to create acoustic archives. Since the 1990s, the digitalization of analogue magnetic tapes has facilitated previously inconceivable access to acoustic sources and contributed to the rise of Public History within general societal awareness. Acoustic historiography must therefore engage with the media characteristics of recording and playback devices; the social situations in which recordings are produced; the potential of acoustic sources for storage, manipulation and transmission and their use in art, politics and society.
Experimental Cylinders – Experiments in Music Psychology around 1900
(2017)
author(s): Julia Kursell
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article asks how the availability of recording in the sound archive changed the way in which researchers and music listeners related to musical performance. I focus on a study of intonation that Otto Abraham carried out between 1906 and 1923 at the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin and that he published in a Festschrift for Carl Stumpf. Abraham conjectured that individuals experience their singing as correct, even when measurement demonstrates that they have actually deviated strongly from the values required by musical notation. As he was able to demonstrate through a series of recordings of singing individuals, this also holds for professional singers and those with absolute pitch. I suggest that the singing of one amusical subject was critical in bringing melodic contour, as a Gestalt quality of song, to the fore as an answer to Abraham's problem, because the recording allowed this individual to articulate his listening in addition to his singing.
Archive, Collection, Museum: On the History of the Archiving of Voices at the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University
(2017)
author(s): Britta Lange
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Available today under the name of the Berlin Sound Archive (Berliner Lautarchiv) or the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University (Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is a collection of now largely digitalized sound storage media begun in 1915 (https://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/, all internet references retrieved 24th June 2016). The collection includes shellac records with recordings of prisoners of war (1915-1918), sound recordings of the voices of so-called famous personalities (1917-1939), speech samples of German dialects (1921-1943), and recitations of poetry and literature in German (1930s and 1940s) as well as magnetic tapes from the 1960s that have not yet been transferred to a digital format. While, since its inception, the collection has repeatedly been referred to as a sound archive, prior to the digitalization of the shellac holdings in the 1990s this term never found its way into any of its official names. Against this background, this article traces both the Sound Archive’s early institutional history (1915-1947) as well as the use of the term “sound archive.” By considering the archiving of voices in the framework of an emerging history of knowledge, it explores the disciplinary contexts (the academic sciences) and configurations of conservation, research, and presentation (collection, archive, laboratory, library, and museum) in which the preserved human voice operates as an epistemic object. On the basis of a renewed examination of a number of sound recordings of prisoners of war, it should be shown how this historical material can be made productive for current research horizons.
Editorial - Encounters With Southeast Asia Through Sound
(2016)
author(s): Marcel Cobussen
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
What “we” as JSS editors had in mind was to make space for some “subaltern voices,” multi-media reports on Southeast Asian soundscapes preferably coming from (local) residents or people who have spent a considerable amount of time there, to find out whether they hear differently, whether they notice different things, different sounds; to find out whether they can bring in other concepts, enrich or change the common discourses in Sound Studies; to explore and bring to our attention what they find sonically relevant.
Domesticated Noise: The Musical Reformation of Identity in Urban Vietnam
(2016)
author(s): Lonan O Briain
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In his composition “New Moon” (Trăng non), saxophonist Trần Mạnh Tuấn appropriates sounds from the musical cultures of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities to create a fusion of regional Vietnamese and international jazz music. The musical cultures are reduced to the raw sounds of instrument timbres which are then reformulated as part of a new popular style by the composer. His detachment of these sounds from the minority cultures and propagation of them as sonic referents to an internal Other nurtures an essentialized understanding of the minorities as different and distant from the urban majority. This research deploys Georgina Born’s proposal of four planes of distinct socialities that are mediated by music and sound (2011) to examine how the musical domestication of these ethnic-themed sounds contributes to the conceptualization of new economically-endowed social classes in urban Vietnam.
Sonopolis
(2016)
author(s): Francisco Lopez
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Original environmental recordings carried out between 1985 and 2010 in more than one hundred cities all over the world.
Evolved, composed, and mastered at “mobile messor” worldwide in 2011.
Soundmapping Beyond The Grid: alternative cartographies of sound
(2016)
author(s): Isobel Anderson
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Drawing from projects that already map sound in unconventional and creative ways, including my collaborative project with Fionnuala Fagan, Stories Of The City: Sailortown (2012), this article explores forms of soundmapping that expand the online gridded soundmap platform. Not only do these examples map the invisible “in-between-spaces” of personal relationships to sound, but also the unseen spaces of urban architectures. Sound is intangible, ephemeral, and invisible in nature, and therefore possesses profound potentials to map invisible geographies, which might otherwise lay silent. We will only bring voice to these other layers of experience if we embrace cartography as a creative and potentially empowering platform.
The Sound of Stuff – Archetypical Sound in Product Sound Design
(2015)
author(s): Anna Symanczyk
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Through their history, materiality, and use, products gain sonic qualities and attributes, which become an integral part of contemporary sound design for these objects. Taking the example of the vacuum cleaner, this article discusses the relationship between historical material properties and product sound design as well as between listening traditions and characteristic product sounds. It concludes that there is an archetypical sound for vacuum cleaners. Following the role of sound through several examples of advertisements, this article performs a cultural analysis of sounding objects and the communication surrounding these sounds in order to better understand the effects that archetypical sounds have on buyer or user perception of product sounds.