Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  EDITORIAL: TOWARDS NEW SONIC EPISTEMOLOGIES (2018) author(s): Marcel Cobussen published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Brian De Palma’s famous 1981 thriller film Blow Out starts with a movie sound effects technician, Jack, who, while recording sounds for a low-budget slasher film in a wooded area near a river, serendipitously captures audio evidence of an assassination involving a presidential candidate. The candidate is sitting in a car that gets a blowout; the car slips into the water, and the candidate drowns. However, listening to the audiotape he inadvertently recorded of the accident, Jack distinctly hears a gunshot just before the blowout. What appears to be an accident caused by a flat tire turns out to be an attempted murder.
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  The Envoicing of Protest: Occupying Television News through Sound and Music (2018) author(s): James Deaville published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  The television coverage of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement discloses a tension between the attention-getting sounds of protesters and the networks’ often dismissive reporting of the sights and sounds of their protests. While the conflict over control of representation has characterized the historical reporting of protest, the Occupy movement presented the networks with particular problems in coverage, since the encampments and associated activities did not afford easy or sensational sound bites. The diversity of the Occupy soundscape, which drew upon typical protest auralities but in new configurations, contributed to the trivializing of the movement as projected in the living rooms of Americans. To situate this phenomenon, the essay examines the prior history of televisual news reporting of the sounds of collective protest, from the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War protests to protest actions related to the Gulf War/War on Terror, the Tea Party and the Arab Spring.
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  The Consideration of Personal Sound Space: Toward a Practical Perspective on Individualized Auditory Experience. (2018) author(s): Elen Fluegge published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This is an account of personal sound space, a way of describing the auditory environment of an individual that emphasizes their conscious participation in a dynamic social exchange within that space, which is meant as a theoretical groundwork for further empirical research. The concept draws on ideas from across cultural studies to articulate a form of individualized auditory experience latent in the discourse. The term is structured into sound space, personal space and personal sound, whose concepts are explored individually as well as integrated in the collective term. Sonic experience is framed as a dynamic spatial-social complex whose conceptualization involves culturally informed ideas of territory and authority. This is compounded by attitudes of property and agency reinforced by the proliferation of personal audio technologies.
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  Music City Excesses: Phenomenological Thresholds and Nashville Noise Regulations (2018) author(s): Michael Butera published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  In this essay I will be exploring phenomenological connections between private and public interpretations of urban sound. First, I will briefly outline a theory of perceptual excess wherein the listener is unable to interpret sounds according to intentional auditory categories. I argue that listeners respond through various acoustic techniques that intentionally change the way spaces sound, reforming acoustic orders. I will explore this in the case of Nashville, Tennessee’s urban noise ordinances. Its constructed identity as ‘Music City’ requires strategic maintenance to ensure that certain sounds are given priority (institutionalize live music) while others are suppressed (pre-recorded music) or marginalized (busking). The specificity of these laws indicates a capitalist cultural nostalgia as well as a fundamental preference for perceptual stability for residents, tourists, and lawmakers alike. A common logic is drawn between the subject as a phenomenological individual and the subject as a listening/governing state. The ability to predict and control which sounds will be heard, to sustain a certain acoustic order, highlights the problem of the listener’s perceptual stability in the context of urban noise and silence.
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  Breaching Sonic Barriers? Sound Studies as a Transdiscipline (2018) author(s): Vincent Meelberg published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  According to Bernie Krause snow creates a distinct acoustic environment, one that is as capricious in range as are the conditions under which snow occurs (Krause 2012, 47). Just as the acoustic characteristics of snow are heterogeneous and variable, so are its semantics and the psychoacoustic level on which its sounds can be described. When we woke up on the morning of December 7, 2012, we were not very happy with the view of an immaculately white urban landscape nor with its accompanying specific, dampened, snowy silence. On that date we, the editors of the Journal of Sonic Studies (JSS), were supposed to host some 25 Dutch sound experts in the center for contemporary art in Leiden, Scheltema, and snow would imply that some of them would not be able to make it to Leiden due to train cancellations.
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• Sound Art: Klang als Medium der Kunst (2018) author(s): Jan Nieuwenhuis published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  On the 15th and 16th of December, 2012, the editors of the Journal of Sonic Studies visited the exhibition “Sound Art: Klang als medium der Kunst” in the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. During and afterwards, they discussed the exhibition and four of its sound installations. This resulted in the variety of perspectives published in this article. The article is presented as a space through which the listener/reader/viewer must navigate. You enter a digital space – or a small exhibition – in which each editor reflects on the exhibition as a whole: Vincent Meelberg discusses sound art from the perspective of interactivity; Sharon Stewart presents four different approaches towards the installations, yet at the same time creates her own para-exhibition as recording-performer pursuing the fleeting nature of sound; Marcel Cobussen reflects upon the omnipresence of sound and the importance of listening; Jan Nieuwenhuis deconstructs the Dutch word “tentoonstelling” (“exhibition” in English) in order to rethink the visual paradigm of the museum and allow sound into its space. After you have listened and read your way through the “entrance hall”, four different sound-spaces remain to be discovered. You can open the door and enter the room by clicking on the images of the sound installations. There, we – the editors – present our perspectives on the installations. Firstly (or lastly, if you prefer) Roberto Pugliese’s Equilibrium is grappled with; then Bernard Leitner’s Pulsierende Stille is absorbed; subsequently you can settle down in the Klangdom; and lastly (or firstly) listen in on Anselm Venezian Nehls’ and Tarik Barri’s #tweetspace.
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