Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  Phonograph, symbolic. Acoustic Evidence in Arno Holz’ Phantasus (2017) author(s): Thomas Forrer published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  The fundamental innovations in modern German verse around 1900 can be ascribed to the emergence of technological media rather than to a deliberate departure from metrical tradition. In 1879, Friedrich Nietzsche had already approached a new style of writing that emulated the performance of oral speech and its singular visual and acoustic phenomena that had become recordable with photography and, as of 1877, with the Edison phonograph. In this article I will focus on the “phonographic” writing techniques of the German naturalist-poet Arno Holz that take the insurmountable difference between the medium of writing and the singular acoustic happening as their precondition. A technique that can be called “acoustic evidence,” employed in Holz’s cycle of poems *Phantasus* (1898ff.), indicates sounds not through writing traditional musical notation or alphabetic letters, but rather by crossing out writing. In this way, Holz’s verses indirectly reference the new “orchestra of life” that Edison’s phonograph had brought into the discourse.
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  Acoustic Ephemeralities: Introduction (2017) author(s): Boris Previsic published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Acoustic Ephemeralities: Introduction
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  At the Margins of the Audible. Morton Feldman’s Ephemeral Compositions (2017) author(s): Dieter Mersch published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  At the Margins of the Audible. Morton Feldman’s Ephemeral Compositions.
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  Writing the Ephemeral. John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing as a Landmark in Media History (2017) author(s): Simon Aeberhard published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing is one of his early, legendarily forbidding speeches first held in 1950. The score of the lecture can be understood as a reaction to one of the most momentous cuts in twentieth century’s media history. Cage’s lecture overtly responds to the establishment of the electromagnetic recording, storing and distributing of acoustic material after World War II by reflecting on these technical developments. The text, however, also accurately and subtly reacts to the profound destabilization of the relationship between literacy and orality triggered by these inventions by applying new methods of writing. Seen as such, the Lecture on Nothing can be connected to Cage’s electronic music on audiotape, Williams Mix for example, and his elaboration of 4’33”, which forms the basis of his “silent pieces.” What unifies these three contemporaneous, but essentially different, works is their thought-provoking semantic emptiness. This article argues that these works are best understood as an artist’s quest for an adequate semiotic means of writing an aural event after electroacoustic media have become widely accessible.
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  Editorial - Encounters With Southeast Asia Through Sound (2016) author(s): Marcel Cobussen published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  What “we” as JSS editors had in mind was to make space for some “subaltern voices,” multi-media reports on Southeast Asian soundscapes preferably coming from (local) residents or people who have spent a considerable amount of time there, to find out whether they hear differently, whether they notice different things, different sounds; to find out whether they can bring in other concepts, enrich or change the common discourses in Sound Studies; to explore and bring to our attention what they find sonically relevant.
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  Taiwanese Bush Warblers imitating garbage trucks: a mutual affair? (2016) author(s): Mark van Tongeren published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  All over Taiwan, garbage trucks equipped with loudspeakers make their rounds, playing tunes that announce their arrival to the citizens. Designed to reach people's homes at a considerable distance from the stopping points, the two garbage truck tunes thrust themselves onto large swaths of Taiwan's landscape and all of its living inhabitants. According to the author, another species, besides homo sapiens sapiens, has taken notice and musically responded to it. He describes how he witnessed a repetitive sound pattern remarkably similar to a part of a garbage truck melody able to emulate these signals. The melody was collectively executed by a small group of animals he could not see, each producing one not at a time. The author offers a possible candidate, the Brown-Flanked Bush Warbler, and a reconstruction of what he heard. These observations are contextualized within the emerging field of zoomusicology.
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