The Signifigance of a Waterfall Divided in Two
(2024)
author(s): Eric Maltz
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
In January of 2022, I traveled with my family to Catarata Gocta, a two-tiered waterfall in the high rainforest, just outside of Cocachimba in Peru’s northeast. I seized this opportunity to conduct an artistic research experiment combining field recording, mystical participation, dream work, philosophy, and psychology. I incite and analyze dreams, peel back the perverse layers of my capitalist induced fantasies, exhaust liquid metaphors, engage in forms of mystical participation, discuss whether it’s even possible to record a place at all and draw connections and conclusions whose coherence is, well, maybe not so coherent. This essay touches on Sonic Journalism, the psychologies of Jung, the art criticism of Sontag and Berger and the art of Cage, Duchamp, and Hunter S. Thompson. The field recordings and images presented here are shreds of evidence supporting my own twisted brand of Gonzo Journalism. It is a tight rope walk across microphone cables and book spines, fueled by coffee, internet databases, and obsessive listening. The gravitational current pulling the waters of Catarata Gocta earthward is the dense center around which this essay orbits. Stretching across its horizon, I feel myself emptied, my thoughts laid bare and made available for self-examination.
Being There: Evocation of the Site in Contemporary Indian Cinema
(2020)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Contemporary Indian films, in their essentially digitalized realms, incorporate techniques such as the location-based multitrack “sync” recording, and surround sound design that reorder the organization of cinematic sound. These practices contrast with the earlier mono- or stereo formats by reconfiguring the linear construct of a soundtrack to produce a spatially evocative sonic environment that offers the listener a more life-like auditory experience of the fictional site. Using significant examples from post-2000 Indian films, this article shows how earlier practices are being replaced by “sync” sound elements and surround sound mixing with a richly spatial arrangement of site-specific ambience. The article argues that these layers of ambient sounds lead to audiences establishing their embodied experience of presence with the fictional site via auditory spatial cognition and immersion in a cinematic soundscape. By situating contemporary sound production practices within the various trajectories of Indian cinema, this article contributes to the broader field of research examining the key developments and emergent aesthetics in constructing spatial environments for cinema.
Sonic Empowerment: Reframing "atmosphere" through Sonic Urban Design
(2020)
author(s): Nicola Di Croce
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
“Urban atmosphere,” which concerns the intangible features that give “life” to everyday environments, provides an important means of appreciating the self-image and narratives of marginalized towns and localities. This paper posits listening critically to sonic environments as a means of exploring and reframing urban atmosphere. Listening practices with a sound art-oriented approach can empower local inhabitants and municipalities by inspiring the collaborative governance of immaterial commons. Sonic urban design, which converges sound art and planning, is presented as a tool for developing awareness of the “uniqueness” and fragility of urban atmosphere through listening activities and proposed community-based sonic guidelines. The initial outcomes of my participation as an artist in residence during the sound art festival Liminaria 2018 provides a recent example of sonic urban design in practice.
Listening in/to Exile: Migration and Media Arts
(2019)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition responds to the current flux of migration and the resulting condition of estrangement. The projects – an augmented book project and a corresponding media artwork – respond to mass migration, hyper-mobility, placeless-ness and nomadism, which are blurring the boundaries between the local and the global, the corporeal and the digital, the private and the public. Through an exploration of the poetic and critical capacities embedded in everyday listening the two projects attempt to shed light on the aesthetics of addressing the notion of exile, alienation and estrangement. The exposition let the viewer/reader engage with the artistic matter; namely, the field recordings and on-site writings - artistic acts of poetic contemplation grounded in a personal experience of the urban alienation, with the aim of movement towards self-understanding and emancipation.
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.
Sonic Information Design
(2018)
author(s): Stephen Barrass
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD) is a multidisciplinary community that includes researchers with backgrounds in music, computer science, psychology, engineering, neuroscience, and the sonic arts. Although this multi-disciplinarity has been beneficial, it has also been the cause of clashes between scientific and artistic research cultures. This paper addresses this divide by proposing design research as a third and complementary approach that is particularly well aligned with the pragmatic and applied nature of the field. The proposal, called sonic information design, is explicitly founded on the design research paradigm. Like other fields of design, sonic information design aspires to make the world a better place, in this case through the use of sound. Design research takes a user-centered approach that includes participatory methods, rapid prototyping, iterative evaluation, situated context, aesthetic considerations, and cultural issues. The results are specific and situated rather than universal and general and may be speculative or provocative, but should provide insights and heuristics that can be reused by others. The strengthening and development of design research in auditory display should lay the path for future commercial applications.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Animal Sounds against the Noise of Modernity and War: Julian Huxley (1887–1975) and the Preservation of the Sonic World Heritage
(2017)
author(s): Marianne Sommer
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper engages with Julian Huxley’s and Ludwig Koch’s sound recording of animals and the production of “soundbooks.” This collection and preservation of animal vocalization is discussed in the larger context of Huxley’s engagement with nature conservation that included the fight against the noise of modernity. He also promoted the protection of nature through the medium of film and its capacity to store and distribute sounds. I focus on Huxley’s directorship of the London Zoo (1935-42) but follow these endeavors up to his involvement in the foundation of the WWF. Once again, the parallels between zoo – where the sound recordings were made – and film, which also presented animated animals, through human and/or animal sound, become apparent. For Huxley, animals could not possess language; that was the preserve of the crown of evolution, i.e. humankind. But they should have a voice. Finding the right voice to politically represent animals on record, film, or cartoon proved to be a long journey.
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.
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.
Co-sounding: Towards a Sonorous Land
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Co-sounding: Towards a Sonorous Land is an artistic research that delves into an Acoustemological unpacking of the landscape, focussing on the site of Amstelpark. The project intends to inculcate a dialogic context within which an intersubjective approach to the perception of land as an equitable habitat of human and non-human lifeforms is developed. This mode of reciprocity and intersubjectivity helps to counteract the nature-culture binary with an ambient and environmental aesthetics in sound arts.
Project partners:
Zone2Source, international platform for art, nature and technology
Educational partners:
Honours Lab, ArtEZ University of the Arts
Project assistants:
Tobias Lintl (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) - design and production support
Christoph Kummerer - coding support
Bidisha Das (KHM Cologne) - system and engineering support
Yann Patrick Martins (IXDM Basel) - coding support
Hearing Geoelectric
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Raviv Ganchrow
connected to: KC Research Portal
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Geological minerals (such as copper, quartz and mica) are embedded in audio circuits and conversely geological processes are teeming with electrical activity. Power grids and Integrated circuits could be described as important waypoints in the domestication of lightning. Advanced methods of geo-sensing and globally coordinated sensor networks are currently plumbing Earth attributes by way of its signals: By way of electrical transduction (vibrations converted into electrical fluctuations) or by directly tapping into ground conductivity (telluric current monitoring and geoelectrical methods). Our growing awareness of earthly variations in voltage manifest a complex intertwining of the geologic, the electric and the technic. What are the terrestrial contexts of audio circuits and conversely what electrical circuitry is at work in geology? What does Earth's circuitry sound like? How can such geoelectric hearing redress the binaries of 'natural' and 'technical' in particular with respect to recordings overt mimetic properties? This research aims to develop non-standard tools for environmental voltage acquisition while looking into historical contexts of geoelectrical methods as a means of bridging the geological dimensions in electronic audio towards contemporary modes of environmental listening and hearing.
Sonic Peripheries: Middling With/In the Event
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Petra Klusmeyer
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition showcases select parts of the doctoral dissertation from which it derives its title. To access the full thesis, follow the link to Leiden University Scholarly Publications (http://hdl.handle.net/1887/77342). The purpose of this exposition is to present a non-linear reading experience featuring a range of materials, including artifacts from a course of research events (see/visit Online Addendum) and individual experimental chapters (see/click, e.g., Experimenting Sound/Non-Sound).
About the research and dissertation
The research explores what and how sound does in certain art practices; it lends an ear to so-called ‘material-discursive’ events that come into expression as in/determined sonic occurrences through aesthetic practices. Likewise, the research done in and through the arts attunes to the vibrational immanence that underlies all experience. This view considers the sonic as a vibrational force and an affective, affirmative, albeit paradoxical event: oscillating between matter and matter-mattering, intuited as intensive force and apprehended as ‘aesthetic figure’ through sensation. This ambiguity or sense of betweenness is felt throughout the thesis and lies at the heart of the inquiry, which asks, among other questions: How do the material conditions of a sonic artwork-performance (the content) and the ensuing sensations (the form of expression) co-emerge; how are they produced in one another?
The dissertation has three main objectives. Firstly, it describes sonic art practice as experimental research and makes a case for curating such practices as a form of research; it positions this type of research as a contribution to new forms of knowledge and provides a resource for future research-creations and (reform of) evaluation practices. Secondly, it brings together philosophy and art to elaborate a genuine manner of working with sonic matter (mattering); it conceptualizes and materializes novel ways of thinking, and creates a case for writing itself as practice and curating/producing art as theory; that is, it seeks to practice what it theorizes and vice versa. Thirdly, it advocates a certain transformation of self that lets us side-step ourselves, intervene and invent possible worlds or future fabulations. Practicing a process-oriented exploration complexifies as it advances; it creates resonances between theory and practice, between audience and sound art, between the written thesis – inclusive of presented artifacts – and the reader. It wants not to reduce but foster awareness of the ongoing complexity of life.
Focus (a document)
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Gabriel Paiuk
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Focus deals with the ways we engage with sound in an environment saturated by audio media technology. Taking the form of a sound installation, Focus invites the visitor to explore the exhibition space by moving throughout, standing or sitting. Through the superimposition of multiple loudspeaker constellations, Focus sets up sound as a sensitive fabric for the listener to traverse, each point prompting diverse modes in which the experience of the sonorous emerges: as a quasi-tactile phenomenon, as an impression of distance, as an activation of memories of lived or recorded spaces. In Focus, the technology of sound emission is not hidden but rather disclosed, enhancing the physical interaction of the listener with these devices, emphasizing how their material properties breed memories and conditions we utilize to make sense of sound around us.
Focus deals with the ways we engage with sound in an environment saturated by audio media technology. Taking the form of a sound installation, Focus invites the visitor to explore the exhibition space by moving throughout, standing or sitting. Through the superimposition of multiple loudspeaker constellations, Focus sets up sound as a sensitive fabric for the listener to traverse, each point prompting diverse modes in which the experience of the sonorous emerges: as a quasi-tactile phenomenon, as an impression of distance, as an activation of memories of lived or recorded spaces. In Focus, the technology of sound emission is not hidden but rather disclosed, enhancing the physical interaction of the listener with these devices, emphasizing how their material properties breed memories and conditions we utilize to make sense of sound around us.open exposition comments (0)