Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  SOUNDMAPPING: Critiques And Reflections On This New Publicly Engaging Medium (2018) author(s): Jacqueline Waldock published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Soundmaps have captured the imagination of acoustic communities, libraries and radio stations alike. These interactive maps have placed soundscape collections and research in a more public and interactive space than ever before. However, does this new form reflect some of the polarizations of past sound projects or are there new fractures to be considered, such as gender, economy and the domestic/public divide? This paper will reflect upon the challenges and hierarchies that have developed alongside this new medium and will begin to critique and question this new form of sound engagement.
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  On the Performance of Sound. The Acoustic Territory of Post-War Sarajevo (2018) author(s): Evy Schubert published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This article concludes a research on the acoustic territory of post-war Sarajevo and a history of its acoustic performance. It will demonstrate the results of the investigation of the participation, contribution and perception of the selected soundscape in terms of its socio-political context. The research focused on two primary questions. First: can urban sound be a direct mirror image of the underlying socio-political condition and, thus, a performance of its source? Second: can, therefore, political peace have its own sound? For this research, the city of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, was chosen. There were two main reasons for its selection, one geographical and the other historical. Sarajevo lies in a narrow valley and is surrounded by hills, a geography comparable to an old Greek amphitheatre, with many of the same acoustic implications. On the mountaintops surrounding the city, you can hear the total sound image as well as detect singular sounds. During the war, between 1992 and 1995, these mountaintops were occupied by Serbian military forces, creating a circular front line without exit that isolated the city from the rest of the country and the world. This led to the assumption that Sarajevo must have a unique and rare acoustic history.
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  We Three, Kinged: Crowning the Aural on 9/11 (2018) author(s): Isaac Vayo published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This study examines the present predominance of visuality in relation to narratives of 9/11, concluding that aurality, typically undervalued in such conversations, is a more accurate and effective representation of 9/11-as-event. Within the broader field of 9/11 aurality, three specific examples are subject to more lengthy analysis in terms of their original context and their presentation to audiences via popular media: the voices of pilot-hijackers Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, the impacts of those jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers, and George W. Bush’s 14 September 2001 speech delivered from atop the rubble at the World Trade Center site. 9/11 aurality, then, succeeds where the visual imagination fails, allowing its account of the event to persist generationally, its internal logic to exist rationally, and its chief interlocutor, Osama bin Laden, to continue the discourse verbally.
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  Modelling the Shopping Soundscape (2018) author(s): Björn Hellström published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This article’s pivotal theme is: How to compose a site-specific sound-art installation for a commercial space in order to improve conditions, while taking perceptual, social, aesthetical, temporal and spatial criteria into account. The interdisciplinary, art-based research approach is derived from the concept of acousmatics, i.e. the process of apprehending any sound, the source of which is invisible. Acousmatic perception concerns the everyday identification process; when lacking visual contact with the sound source, we automatically seek references, such as social (what produces the sound and what is my relation to it?), aesthetical, spatial and temporal (e.g. orientation and demarcation). The acousmatic concept identifies phenomena based on individually, culturally and spatially conditioned experiences. Today, a shopping culture dominates urban space. Indoor malls expose us to all types of acousmatically perceived sounds: jingles, signals, music and Muzak from public loudspeakers, mobile devices, etc. In this respect, one could claim that the soundscape of the shopping culture embodies an acousmatic environment. In 2009, the research and sound-art group Urban Sound Institute (USIT) created a permanent sound installation in a shopping mall (Gallerian) located in downtown Stockholm. This installation serves as a case study for the present paper. The artistic assignment involved the creation of a meeting place without material devices as well as the enhancement of the overall atmosphere. The research objective was to elucidate different qualities of the sound installation in regard to the acousmatics of the shopping mall, promoting discussions on the articulation of sound-space configurations in relation to time and site-specific context, issues on musical-architectural qualities as well as objective, subjective and inter-subjective interrelationships between the experience of the sound-art installation and the experience of the shopping mall soundscape. Other applied, interrelated concepts are metabolic environment and masking- and cutting effects.
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  Auditory and Technological Culture: the Fine-tuning of the Dancehall Sound System “Set” (2018) author(s): Julian Henriques published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This paper describes how sound engineers in Jamaica fine-tune the huge and powerful dancehall sound systems to achieve their best auditory performance. This provides an example of how cybernetic systems combine musical and technological processes. The phonographic apparatus of the set utilizes three basic material electromagnetic processes: (1) power; (2) control (Bateson 1987) and (3) transduction (Simondon 1992). The sound System engineers fine-tune with a technique of compensation, described in terms of two corporeal sensorimotor practices: (1) the kinetic motor process of manipulating the value of particular components, or substituting one for another and (2) the haptic sensory process of monitoring the auditory output of the set. Further, the engineers are engaged in (3) evaluating or skilled listening (Sterne 2003) for the particular sonic qualities such as “balance,” “weight” and “attack” that the fine-tuning aims to achieve. Engineers learn to evaluate, select and combine sounds in the sociocultural milieu of an apprenticeship – as elements of a communication system (Wilden 1972). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 18th International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics & Cybernetics. 7 to 12th August, 2006, Baden-Baden, Germany.
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  A Sonic Paradigm of Urban Ambiances (2018) author(s): Jean-Paul Thibaud published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This paper intends to investigate urban ambiances through focusing on the world of sounds. Although the aesthetics of everyday life implies employing the whole human sensorium, making it difficult to artificially separate the information received from the individual senses from each other, I explore what can be learned about an ambiance when we just listen to it. In other words, how and under which conditions is it possible to develop a sonic paradigm of urban ambiances? The basic argument is to consider sound as a particularly efficient medium to investigate and develop an account of urban ambiances. Various ideas will be explored in order to answer this question, involving theoretical, epistemological and methodological arguments. Three main directions are accentuated: the first one relates to the tuning into an ambiance, the second relates to the unfolding of an ambiance, and the third relates to the situating within an ambiance.
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