Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  The Planetorium: Sonic Information Design for Earthling Audiences (2018) author(s): R. Michael Winters, Avrosh Kumar published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  For millennia, humans have looked into the night sky and wondered at what they saw. This curiosity led them to develop instruments that enabled them to look deeply into space, which revealed celestial bodies in ever-greater detail. They developed new mathematics and physics to better understand and predict the cosmos and began to teach each other, pointing to what they knew to be true. Sadly, as the objective facts and figures poured in with ever-increasing precision, the oral traditions of myths, stories, and gods began to fade from view. In the past century, some humans have worked to cultivate a new technology that would allow humans to use their ears to hear the objects that, before, they could only see. By transforming numbers into sound, humans could listen again, which made those who could hear it very happy. However, others did not comprehend it, became confused, and began to ask one another: How can I make sense of something I cannot see? How do I know what I am hearing is true? Is this some kind of music, or something else altogether? In this paper, we use “The Planetorium” as a metaphor and context for understanding how we might best design aural celestial experiences for earthling audiences. Audiences are groups of individual humans all listening to the same thing at the same place for some length of time. And while planetariums are places they go to learn about space through stunning views and new perspectives, planetoriums (like auditoriums) are places they go to listen.
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  Listening to Deep Listening. Reflection on the 1988 Recording and the Lifework of Pauline Oliveros (2018) author(s): Sharon Stewart published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This article weaves personal reflections upon the 1988 recording by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis, entitled Deep Listening®️, with a story of Deep Listening, the lifework of Pauline Oliveros, in which the author refers to highlights in the history of as well as presents some of the foundational aspects of the praxis. Throughout this story of Deep Listening appears, in the form of audio and film material, the first track of the Deep Listening recording, “Lear”; Pauline Oliveros herself, leading a Deep Listening Session Masterclass during the Sonic Acts Festival XIV in Amsterdam in February 2012; and two examples of practitioners of Deep Listening who present and comment upon their work and approach. The focus of this article seeks to remain close to a “doing of”: a bodymind engagement with listening, responding, and creating in a way that reflects the practice of Deep Listening. A type of receptive listening, an inner opening to and following of the movements of the body-with-sound encounter, is presented here as “somatic listening.”
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  The Harley Effect: Internal and external factors that facilitate positive experiences with product sounds (2018) author(s): Elif Özcan published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Everyday activities are laden with emotional experiences involving sound. Our interactions with products (shavers, hairdryers, electric drills) often cause sounds that are typically unpleasant to the ear. Yet, we may get excited with the sound of an accelerating Harley Davidson because the rumbling sound represents adventure or an espresso machine pouring cappuccino because the sound signals an upcoming relaxing event. These examples demonstrate that it is often difficult to predict how pleasant or unpleasant a product sound is and that the circumstances surrounding sound events (i.e., external factors) can influence our judgment regarding those sounds. This paper discusses these external factors and provides a technical support for this notion. It will further present implications that could influence future product designers. Furthermore, the aim of this paper is to re-position the role of sound in human-product interactions.
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  Tuned In and Hands On: Sound Designers Beyond Technical Expertise (2018) author(s): Isabelle Delmotte published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  The term sound designer is a relatively new addition to the professional roles in a film sound crew. Its use can be traced to the 1970s when the dismantlement of some major Hollywood studios gave space for more experimental approaches to film making. A study on acoustic ecologies and cinema sound allowed for creative and altruistic collaborations with some Australian cinema professionals. Subsequent face-to-face interviews and correspondence with the participants to the study pointed to the humanity and concerns at play behind the screen. It is apparent that the capacity of sound designer cannot be pigeonholed: it oscillates according to the demands of a film production and depends on its director’s and financial backers' sonic awareness. Amongst professional sound makers themselves exists a lack of consensus on the role and importance of the position of sound designer. The author proposes a way to lessen professional ambiguity and increase public recognition of atmospheric cinema sound. Invoking atmospheric sound at the inception of an audio-visual narrative could reward its makers and audiences in unsuspected ways. To acknowledge sound designers as architects of sensations and, by the same token, include viscerality and affect as creative elements of film production, could lead to a different appreciation of our lives in sound.
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  The Sonic Lifeworld: A Phenomenological Exploration of the Imaginative Potential of Animation Sound (2018) author(s): James Batcho published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  The wonder of animation lies in its ability to create entirely new worlds that exist only in the imagination. Much care is taken to render these worlds visibly in great detail. Sound, however, is grounded in everyday reality in order to legitimize our expectations of experiential logic and continuity. This paper argues for new ways of thinking about how sound might move beyond this strict adherence to the visual by going beyond the rational. The problem of sound design is that it is an exercise in satisfying modes of Cartesian dualism, which separates the outside world of extension from the inner world of consciousness. Sound design should instead be conceived phenomenologically, as modes of disclosure and nondisclosure to consciousness. I propose new ways of thinking about the sonic connection of character to lifeworld, and in the process offer a critique of prevailing notions of film theory as related to the hearing and listening subject.
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  SONIC FACTS FOR SOUND ARGUMENTS: MEDICINE, EXPERIMENTAL PHYSIOLOGY, AND THE AUDITORY CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE 19TH CENTURY (2018) author(s): Axel Volmar published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This article addresses the auditory culture of science and problematizes sonic practices as epistemological practices. In order to deepen our understanding about how scientific knowledge is acquired, represented, and constructed through sound, I discuss case studies from the history of medicine and the life sciences in which sound and listening do not form the objects of scientific observation and reasoning but epistemic tools employed by scientists to produce “sound” scientific facts. First I reassess the question why physicians began to listen to the sounds of the human body in order to diagnose diseases around 1800. After that, I follow late nineteenth-century neurophysiologists who used the electric telephone to study the nervous system by transforming bioelectric currents into sounds. I argue that such acoustemic practices and technologies favorably emerge in the presence of in-visibilities, i.e. situations in which a direct visual observation or representation of the object of study is hindered or impossible. I also show that the success of these practices largely depends on whether or not it is possible to develop the sounds of science into stable frameworks of sonic facts.
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