Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  Voice, Narrative, Place: Listening to Stories (2018) author(s): Isobel Anderson published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Sound art is rarely associated with storytelling. While it is widely recognised that sound is deeply connected to narrative and imagery (e.g. Emmerson 1986; Wishart 1996), it is sound’s relationship to physical space that is often referred to in order to define this medium [or: that often defines this connection]. While this aspect of sound is important, I argue that the combination of sound and oral storytelling engages the listener’s imagination with the unseen and indefinable qualities of sound through its invisible dialogue with our mind. In addition, when this combination is applied to specific locations or sites, this listening experience profoundly contributes to our construction of ‘place’. Therefore, this article attempts to open up a discussion of the relationship between sound, stories and place, using examples of sound art pieces that explore the listening potentials of this combination within site-specific audio works. Through voice and sound, these works tell stories of and/or in place, referred to in this paper as site-specific stories. These stories require the listener to engage creatively with their narratives and, therefore, induce a productive listening state. Three main factors that affect this listening process are discussed; [1] the environment or listening place; [2] the storyteller or disembodied voice; and [3] the inner voice. Finally, this article concludes that further analysis and discussion of oral storytelling within sound art and its relationship to site is needed in order to understand the productive listening potentials of this combination, which shape our surrounding environments.
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  AFFECTIVE LISTENING: China’s Experimental Music and Sound Art Practice (2018) author(s): Adel Wang Jing published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  When we listen affectively, we listen with and to our bodies. The ear-becoming-body. When a sound does not carry any identifiable, decodable, or communicative message, it affects the listening body in the way touching does. Sound touches the listening body, causing concretely felt intensities before the mind knows. Affective listening is a commitment to forces, intensities and becoming. One listens to the Qi or “haecceities” of sound, which are only later reduced and signified as harmony, melody, or emotions (Cox 2011; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Massumi 2002). Affective listening resembles Buddhist meditation in that both emphasize the practice of Qi (of body-mind-soul) rather than the mind alone, and both lead to self-transforming rather than self-transcending. In the context of Chinese experimental music and sound art practice, affective listening functions as the cultivation of the self, aspiring to the state of selflessness. This paper presents the initial stage of a larger project to formulate the model of “affective listening” as a mode afforded by China’s free improvisation and experimental music practices.
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  EDITORIAL: Listenings (2018) author(s): Marcel Cobussen published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  In 2005 Dutch musicologist, composer, and writer Elmer Schönberger gave the Huizinga lecture entitled ‘Het Grote Luisteren – reikhalzen naar muziek’ [The Large Listening – yearning for music].[1] It is a passionate plea for a disinterested, disengaged listening to ‘real’ music, music as an autonomous art form, and explicitly opposed to popular music with its connection to ‘easy’ or consumptive listening. With great enthusiasm, Schönberger joins the heritage of Eduard Hanslick and his ‘tönend bewegte Formen’ [tonally moving forms] and Peter Kivy’s ‘music alone’. He condescendingly refers to the late 18th century, the only period in Western history in which the utmost refinement and the greatest music-technical complexity had merged with the popular virtues of street songs: the Mozart operas and Haydn symphonies. Schönberger’s Large Listening is a structural listening to high art that has, obviously, disconnected itself from socio-historical circumstances. Large Listening is not only a return to the basic material of music, to the tones themselves, but also requires understanding of the structural, architectural, and expressive richness of this ‘music alone’. Large Listening is listening to Webern, Stravinsky, Bach, Purcell, and Bruckner instead of Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ (all examples are taken from Schönberger’s lecture).
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  Editorial: Materials of Sound (2018) author(s): Caleb Kelly published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Editorial: Materials of Sound
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  Not at Home: The Uncanny Experiences of Radio Home Run (2018) author(s): Heather Contant published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  In this paper, I attempt to better understand the Japanese media artist Tetsuo Kogawa’s concept of radioart by examining the relationship of this concept to movement. To do this, I focus on the Japanese term ika, which can be used to describe the uncanny feeling that results from aesthetic strategies, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s artistic techniques of defamiliarization or Bertolt Brecht’s alienating tactics of Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt). Discussions of ika not only circulated through and around the intellectual and artistic communities that Kogawa participated in during the 1970s and 1980s, they also influenced the practices of the very low-powered FM radio stations, Radio Polybucket and Radio Home Run, established by Kogawa’s students in the early 1980s. By discussing the emphasis of ika and physical movement in Radio Polybucket’s and Radio Home Run’s practices, I begin to trace a central element in Kogawa’s concept of radioart, which I call a kinetic interaction with the material conditions of radio. Through this kinetic interaction, Kogawa makes the material aspects of radio phenomena—its technology, its electromagnetic waves, and its sonic content—perceptible in a new way and thereby reveals previously hidden possibilities.
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  Bodies and Energy, Circuits and Sound: Rethinking and Listening to Leon Ernest Eeman’s Relaxation Circuit with a Bio-synthesizer (2018) author(s): Pia van Gelder published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Leon Ernest Eeman’s Cooperative Healing: The Curative Properties of Human Radiations (1947) documents decades of the author’s experiments with bio-circuits, beginning in 1919. Detailing the many configurations and uses of Eeman’s Relaxation Circuit, the book proposes that these circuits promote muscular relaxation, counter fatigue and disease, and stimulate activity by harnessing and circulating radiant energy from within the body. Using only electrical conductors and copper wire, the circuit connected subjects to themselves, redirecting energies internally, or in parallel with a number of subjects, sharing energy collectively. Eeman’s work explores the body as a kind of battery, working with configurations based on polarities—from head to toe and left to right. Although writing on Eeman is scarce, recent literature examining historical conceptions of energy and the body, including the work of Carolyn Thomas De La Peña, stress the importance of examining similar practices of energetic healing using bioelectricity as they inform our present relationships with technology, medicine, energy and the body. This paper will introduce Eeman’s work and discuss my artistic reenactment of the Relaxation Circuit as a participatory installation. This work, also entitled Relaxation Circuit, was presented in 2015 at Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island in Sydney. The work recreated Eeman’s circuit for five participants with the addition of a bio-synthesizer, which included five oscillators modulated by the conductivity of each participant’s skin. In this reworking, participants were asked to lie in the circuit and listen to the amplified sounds of their collective bodies. This paper examines people’s experiences with bioelectricity in the work, both embodied and sonified.
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