Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  Walking Hanoi - Reflections on improvisation, listening and being attached (2024) author(s): Franziska published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  "Walking Hanoi 2024 - Reflections on improvisation, listening and being attached" is an audio visual piece, which stems from my long standing connection to Vietnam, and specifically to an artistic research project that took place in late March 2024 in Hanoi. It took place as part of an international project - led by VIetnamese researchers, musicians and artists - on thinking through how best to digitise the diverse ethnic minority music in Vietnam. A sound walk, a gamified, ambulatory listening activity, with around 50 international artists/researchers forms the basis for this reflective piece on improvisation, situated listening, on embodied being, identity and the ways we attach ourselves to things, and how things attach themselves to us. In reflecting on improvisation and being, the piece, written, narrated and produced by Franziska Schroeder, draws upon the insights of artists and writers, including Simon Rose, Donna Haraway, Lucy Suchman, Judith Butler, Martin Heidegger to reflect on the situated-ness of the 2 hour street walk in Hanoi. It is a personal reflection, informed by how unspoken, often ineffable knowledge can shape one’s internal perspective. This internal perspective, or ‘insider point of listening’ becomes a central theme in this piece, framing the perception of an improvising self in relation to her tactile and sonic surroundings.
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  The Production of High Fidelity Audio Electronics and the Politics of Technological and Social Modernization in Late State Socialist Poland (2024) author(s): Patryk Wasiak published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This paper investigates the development of the production of High Fidelity (Hi-Fi), audios and the emergence of an accompanying audiophile culture in late state socialist Poland of the 1970s. My case study offers a discussion on the re-negotiating of the cultural values of a specifically marketed technology that was used as a status symbol in affluent market economy countries. In state-socialist Poland, a host of social actors appropriated Hi-Fi audios technologies and audiophile culture to be part of a nationwide project of technological and social modernization. I investigate how in this specific historical setting the mass-scale development and the production of Hi-Fi audios emerged, and how this was embedded into the government policy of building “consumer socialism.” This development also corresponded with a state-sponsored program of technological modernization, in which the electronics industry was identified as a flagship sector that received substantial government investment. I also discuss the emergence of a local audiophile culture, which was redefined by intermediary actors, from being a Western elitist “consumption microculture” into an accessible form of cultural uplift for working-class youth.
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  Music Discoveries That Could Have Been (2024) author(s): Andreas Helles Pedersen published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Envision a mobile application focusing on music discovery via operationalized and interrelated metadata. Imagine that this application builds on a certain record collection developed under the auspices of a public service institution. Then visualize the application as a vehicle for telling forgotten and neglected histories of recorded music, and you have DR DJ. This article reads the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) through the media archaeological notion of imaginary media by discussing a proposal for music discovery that never came to be. This proposal is a discarded idea for a mobile application called DR DJ, which the article assesses through Siegfried Zielinski’s concept of variantology. The article provides an analysis of DR’s actual digital music archive by viewing the unfulfilled potentials and desires of DR DJ as imaginary media co-constituting the realized technologies of DR’s music communication. The article evolves a speculative scenario where an actualized DR DJ potentiates experiences of concurrent lines in the history of recorded music, while also highlighting structural limitations and a reaffirmation of Western modalities.
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  The Relevance of Point of Audition in Television Sound: Rethinking a Problematic Term (2024) author(s): Svein Høier connected to: Norwegian University of Science and Technology published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  There are good reasons to consider point of audition (POA) as a problematic term when writing about sound. This essay addresses the different challenges one meets when using the term and discusses different alternatives for future use of this terminology within the field of television sound. The motivation for rethinking the term is the analytical and descriptive problems raised when writing about recent trends in television sound in drama, sports, news, documentaries and other television genres. The argumentation refers to the flexible and creative uses of television sound today and discusses how various production examples can be better accounted for by refining the term point of audition. All in all, four categories of point of audition are suggested for analysis: observational, active, individual and personal POAs.
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  Touching Excess: Haptic Sound from the Multispecies Delta (2024) author(s): Sandro Simon published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Mollusc gleaning in the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal, hinges on the situated navigation of a deltaic world in flux. It unfolds both above and below water as well as in the mud and is crucially guided by haptic engagement, which in turn generates sound. Audio/visual inquiry into gleaning explores the sensuality of this haptic engagement and its more-than-human dimensions. Haptic sound, as this article traces, has thereby been key. Indexing to touch and how it creates contact with the self and with the other, haptic sound affords proximity. At the same time, it points beyond the all-knowing and all-sensing self by probing intensities and making us aware of resistance and impenetrability. As such, haptic sound evolves at a limit and harbors excess. In the recordings from the delta, haptic sound is also conveyed by the “indeterminate” and the ways tones and sounds mix and interchange and are difficult to localize and categorize; by the “disproportionate” and the ways the sound of touch is amplified and appears as “too loud”; or by the “imperfect” and the ways sound is grainy, overdriven, distorted, dull, piercing, full of static hiss or windy, and so forth. Thereby, the materiality of recording devices and the constructiveness of mediation with all its affordances and limitations become palpable as well. Haptic sound, this article concludes, is thus touching and, in this touching, evokes both more-than-human sensitivity and alterity. In mobilizing both experience and reflection, it ruptures anthropocentrism and ultimately opens up pathways to reconsider both anthropology and cinema as well as audio/visual practice in general with an ear to an embodied multispecies conviviality.
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  (Back)ground Noise. A multimodal Ethnography of Loudspeakers in a Roma Neighbourhood (2024) author(s): Jonathan LARCHER published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  By combining text and three video essays, this contribution presents a multimodal ethnography of loudspeakers in the Roma neighborhood of a Romanian village. It is based on video recordings, which were left out of the analysis and editing of my documentary films because of sound distortion. Revisiting my fieldnotes and the “ethnographic rubbish,” here I establish a critical study of my initial position – for 15 years I wasn’t paying attention to loudspeakers as an object of study in their own right – and I argue how these sounds have become auditory markers of the neighborhood since, at least, the beginning of the 2000s. The article thereby contributes to the fields of both anthropology and sound studies. It shows how the use of loudspeakers is made up of rivalry, interference, fame, fraternity, and familism. Moreover, the analysis shows how the lines between public and private spaces, and between oblique listening and noise cancellation are continually reconfigured in a community obsessed with mutual acquaintance.
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