Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  Silencing Urban Exhalations: a case study of student-led soundscape design (2017) author(s): Jordan Lacey published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This paper describes a practice-led soundscape studies project in which students created sound interventions to transform the “voice of the city.” A loud exhaust fan outlet dominated the site, and students were asked to create a soundscape intervention in response to an imaginative-artistic question: the exhaust outlet is the voice of the city, speaking; can this voice be deciphered, transformed, augmented? Students responded with live sound-art, musical and electroacoustic performances played through loudspeakers placed adjacent to the exhaust outlet, and physical changes to the environment with interactive sound-making artifacts. The intervention was informed by the acoustic ecology movement’s maxim that acoustic design and the “retrieval of a significant aural culture” is a “task for everyone” (Schafer 1977: 206); thus, students were encouraged to listen and creatively respond to the dominant sound. Students were introduced to a mixture of acoustic ecology listening exercises and structural approaches derived from the Research Centre on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment (CRESSON). The project aimed to demonstrate that with the assistance of educational resources, city dwellers, given the opportunity to creatively interact with city sounds, might revitalize their own city-relationship through participatory soundscape design.
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  Noise as “sound out of place”: investigating the links between Mary Douglas’ work on dirt and sound studies research (2017) author(s): Hugh Pickering, Tom Rice published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  “Noise” is an important subject in sound studies research. However, due in large part to the fact that judgements about what constitutes noise are highly subjective, researchers have often struggled to define it. Where attempts have been made, many have settled on a definition of noise as “sound out of place,” a reformulation of Mary Douglas’ definition of “dirt” as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966: 44). Beyond this, however, no effort has been directed towards exploring the link between dirt and noise or seeing how far the analogy between the two extends. This article corrects this omission by undertaking a close reading of Douglas’ writing on “dirt” and linking it to contemporary sound studies research. It argues that far more than simply giving rise to the definition “sound out of place,” Douglas’ classic anthropological work can be used as the basis for an integrated “theory of noise,” deepening our understanding of what it means when we describe a sound as “noise” and drawing attention to the ambiguous, transgressive and dangerous qualities and potentials of noise.
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• Audio Acid: Affective Design and the Psychoacoustic Trip (2017) author(s): Ryan LaLiberty published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  As a New Age commodity, binaural beat audio comes packed up with the pseudoscientific imagery and discourses of the loose social movement. If this material is to believed, the listener can expect a broad range of effects, from increased sexual prowess to a deeper connection with the infinite cosmos. While refraining from critiquing such claims, this paper explores how affective experience has been –– and is being –– designed and commodified through binaural beat audio, in the interplay of synthesized sound and the sensing body. The affective subjects of binaural beats are positioned across materialities and temporalities, from the psychoacoustic capacities of the body, to the abilities of precision-synthesized sound towards producing the specific microtemporalities of binaural beat audio. This paper will situate these materialities and temporalities historically, with an ear lent to the processes of “crystallization,” to use the language of Bruno Latour, that have cemented binaural beat audio as contemporary media objects.
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• Post-Natural Sound Arts (2017) author(s): Mark Peter Wright published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This article argues for a new critical perspective called “Post-Natural Sound Arts” (PNSA). Its focus resides within the context of environmental sound arts and disciplines such as field recording, acoustic ecology and soundscape studies. PNSA questions entanglements of power and agency between recordists and their subjects and produces new epistemological consequences in relation to silence, subjectivity and technology. By discussing historical and contemporary audio documents, the author demonstrates how sonic representations are part of an interlacing of geographies, media, and time. These recordings harbor trace evidence of anthropogenic incursion and are re-heard in order to question a history of non-impact within the practice of environmental sound arts. PNSA therefore aims to function as both an audial-analytical methodology and instigator for artistic praxis.
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  Animal Sounds against the Noise of Modernity and War: Julian Huxley (1887–1975) and the Preservation of the Sonic World Heritage (2017) author(s): Marianne Sommer published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This paper engages with Julian Huxley’s and Ludwig Koch’s sound recording of animals and the production of “soundbooks.” This collection and preservation of animal vocalization is discussed in the larger context of Huxley’s engagement with nature conservation that included the fight against the noise of modernity. He also promoted the protection of nature through the medium of film and its capacity to store and distribute sounds. I focus on Huxley’s directorship of the London Zoo (1935-42) but follow these endeavors up to his involvement in the foundation of the WWF. Once again, the parallels between zoo – where the sound recordings were made – and film, which also presented animated animals, through human and/or animal sound, become apparent. For Huxley, animals could not possess language; that was the preserve of the crown of evolution, i.e. humankind. But they should have a voice. Finding the right voice to politically represent animals on record, film, or cartoon proved to be a long journey.
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  Smorzando. Chopin on the MP3 player (2017) author(s): Michel Roth published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  My article focuses on the phenomenon of the ephemeral in music in general. I would like to stay with piano music for a while, where the rapid fading away of tone is normal, and a central component for the regulation of this process, the damper, is called il smorzatore in Italian. The Préludes Op. 28 by Frédéric Chopin will serve as one example; I will later move on to a piano LP by the Swiss artist Dieter Roth and will end with an orchestral work by the young German composer Hannes Seidl.
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