Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  Acoustic Territories of the Body: Headphone Listening, Embodied Space, and the Phenomenology of Sonic Homeliness (2021) author(s): Jacob Kingsbury Downs published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Can we describe certain sonic experiences as “homely,” even when they take place outside of a traditional home-space? While phenomenological accounts of home abound, with writers detailing a rich spectrum of the felt characteristics of the homely including safety, familiarity, and affective “warmth,” there is a scarcity of research into sonic experience that engages with such literatures. With specific interest in the experience of embodied space, I account here for what might be termed feelings of “sonic homeliness” as they emerge during headphone listening. After forming a conceptual model of homeliness that draws from phenomenological philosophy, I investigate its applicability to experiences of headphone listening. Through analysis of primary interview data, I consider how headphones may be said to territorialize space for listeners, analyzing how sonic “boundaries” are experienced in relation to the body, as well as how some listeners describe their experiences as interiorized, comforting, and “wombic.”
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  ANTIVIRUS !Make some domestic noise! on ∏ Node Part II (2021) author(s): Sarah Brown and Valentina Vuksic, Valentina Vuksic published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  !Make Some Domestic Noise! was a series of collective online performances that took place during the first COVID-19 lockdown. They featured what might be described as an online domestic noise big band. As everyone was isolated at home, the ∏ Node collective launched the Antivirus program to train people on how to join and contribute their own stream and sounds. Being alone at home can be stressful, but it can also reveal the beauty of everyday noises. On a weekly basis, people were invited by email to participate by playing with the noises of their domestic appliances and live stream the results. These separate audio streams were then mixed in real time and sent to the main output stream. This was enabled by the ∏ Node site structure, which provides a volume control for every active stream. The website also has an Internet Relay Chat through which participants can, and did, directly interact.
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• Soundwalking Homes in Design Ethnography (2021) author(s): Stine S. Johansen and Peter Axel Nielsen published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  In this paper, we investigate the use of soundwalks in a design ethnographical study. For this study we introduced the concept of sound zones to participants from different households and used soundwalks to enable them to discuss the concept, which would, ideally, reveal design opportunities and constraints. Soundwalks have been used in urban planning to achieve insights regarding resident perceptions of the soundscape in a local environment. As an additional positive offshoot, interaction design studies has used the method to build awareness among people living in a particular environment. With this paper, we provide insights into what can be gained from using soundwalks to engage participants in an abductive process and discussion about the concept and idea of sound zone technology. We present three specific ways that recorded, self-guided soundwalks supported this process: Establishing design conditions, enabling unexpected sounds, and supporting embodied experiences. We relate this to the theoretical constructs of temporality and abduction and thereby extend the soundwalk method to support reflections about possible futures of implementing a design.
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  Fading Quetly (2021) author(s): Nanna Hauge Kristensen published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This translated audio piece is a sonic exploration of the everyday life of an elderly woman called Alice. Alice lives in a suburb of Copenhagen. Based on the ways in which she inhabits her home a sonic cartography is unfolding, revealing a close connection between the acoustic environment and her bodily decline.
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• Space, Sound, and the Home(less) (2021) author(s): Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Following Rosalyn Deutsche, this essay examines how the binary opposition enforced by the boundaries of domesticity enforce containment and enclosure, particularly of excluded bodies, i.e. the homeless. This enclosure, which is read through Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the decorporealization of space, is enforced primarily through a logic of visuality and compartmentalization. This essay proposes sound as a means to counter these states of enclosure. Using concepts of dwelling (Heidegger), weaving (Ingold), and nomadism (Braidotti), a sonic recorporealization is developed through personal, domestic sound art experimentation and instrument building. The results and repercussions are then examined in the context of the singular home, its local community, and society more broadly, wherein sound is proposed as a means to instigate practices of spatial recorporealization.
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• Echoes of Subjectivity: A Literary Acoustemology of the Home (2021) author(s): Katharina Schmidt published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This paper works towards an acoustemology of the home by investigating the home’s depiction in a literary text, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. This interdisciplinary approach is chosen to explore the potential of tapping into sonic epistemologies encapsulated in literature. Borrowing Brandon LaBelle’s concept of acoustic territories, relationships between notions of home and the auditory are traced in the novel, leading to an analysis that develops the sonic figure of the echo as a micro-epistemology. In a close reading of selected scenes, the aesthetic and philosophical implications are examined and, drawing on Levinas, Irigaray, Nancy, and Deleuze, this text traces how the figure of the echo ultimately provides the structure of the subject as it is constituted in the ethical encounter, in the resonance with an Other. In turn, this analysis reflects on how the conditions of the “feminine” sphere of the home inform conceptualizations of ethics, politics, and philosophy.
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