Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

• 
  Sound Art / Street Life: Tracing the social and political effects of sound installations in London (2016) author(s): Christabel Stirling published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London (2013-14) to address the social and political effects of installation and place-based sound-works. I begin by reviewing a number of theoretical approaches to the city, using my own and others’ ethnographic accounts of London to problematize some of the affirmative conceptualizations of the city being propagated by non-representational theories and cultural geographers. In so doing, I provide the theoretical and contextual substratum for my ensuing discussion of the sound-works, and offer an initial view on why physical urban public space remains crucial to progressive politics. I then examine the sonic re-arrangement of public space in three site-specific sound installations. Through ethnographic analysis of the social dynamics summoned into being by each sound-work, and the “multiple mediations” that animated such dynamics (Born 2005), I offer interpretations as to whether, and if so how, the sound installations might be enlisted as part of a process oriented towards mobilizing democratic designs.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Sound Art and Public Engagement in the Built Environment: Reflections from an Architecture Center (2016) author(s): Conor McCafferty published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This article explores the deployment of sound in architectural-curatorial and community engagement contexts through the work of PLACE, a multidisciplinary not-for-profit architecture center in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The author, who worked with PLACE and contributed to the projects discussed here, contextualizes architecture centers and their relationship with sound before examining the specific case of sound and sound art in Northern Ireland and case studies of projects delivered by PLACE. Specifically, the article evaluates two sound installation artworks and three community engagement projects for young audiences. As a means of curating urbanism and architecture, sound-art-as-public-art affords useful strategies to examine, describe or critique the environment as alternatives to traditional architecture exhibition formats. Sound’s temporality and materiality allow sound art works to exist as temporary sculptural interventions in the urban sphere, with attendant implications for public art procurement and urban acoustics. Rich territories of engagement are opened when using sound in a community participatory context.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Instrumental Operations in the Urban Assemblage (2016) author(s): Colin Ripley published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Two major developments in architectural thinking of the past decade: an emerging interest in atmospheric design, on the one hand, and developments in responsive architectures, on the other, have produced a fertile ground for responsive acoustic environments. After a brief discussion of recent projects by the author’s research group in which acoustic environments and their human occupants are considered to be components of a single system, the paper speculates regarding the potential impact of such systems on the contemporary urban environment.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Mapping Soundfields: A User’s Manual (2015) author(s): Norie Neumark published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This paper was written as a keynote address for ESSA 2014, Mapping the Field, where the conference organizers asked me to reflect on my own and others’ journeys between sound theory and sound practice. As a live presentation, focused on voice, my aim was to speak in a way that would invoke the journey and invite the audience to join me. To do this, I both took literally the conference’s trope of mapping, and also, in terms of style, wrote/spoke in a performative mode that does not always translate easily into a written form. While I have adapted that address for written publication here, I have chosen to leave some traces of the aural mode, because in my view it speaks to the specific task of evoking a (theoretical and practical) journey. I have also retained the voice of situated knowledge, even if I have curbed some of its more poetic and emphatic spoken moments, because it resonates with the aim of reflecting on my own and others’ journeys, as I hope will unfold in the paper below.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  The Sound of Stuff – Archetypical Sound in Product Sound Design (2015) author(s): Anna Symanczyk published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Through their history, materiality, and use, products gain sonic qualities and attributes, which become an integral part of contemporary sound design for these objects. Taking the example of the vacuum cleaner, this article discusses the relationship between historical material properties and product sound design as well as between listening traditions and characteristic product sounds. It concludes that there is an archetypical sound for vacuum cleaners. Following the role of sound through several examples of advertisements, this article performs a cultural analysis of sounding objects and the communication surrounding these sounds in order to better understand the effects that archetypical sounds have on buyer or user perception of product sounds.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  From Particle Data to Particular Sounds: Reflections on The Affordances of Contemporary Sonification Practices (2015) author(s): Thomas Bjørnsten published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This article reflects on recent notions about data sonification within sound-based experimental and artistic practices. The intention is not to survey the current state of data sonification methods and techniques as such, but rather to suggest a number of selected points of critique for addressing specific assumptions about processes and discourses related to what we may broadly refer to as sonification. Furthermore, these issues will be addressed by critically asking what we understand by “data” in the first place, as something susceptible to be turned into actual sounding material. Considering how specific discourses and cultural understandings frame contemporary notions of data, the article also includes different examples of alternative, exploratory practices. Thus, one of the aims will partly be to open up a transdisciplinary discussion about the critical affordances and potential pitfalls of data sonification seen both as an aesthetic and a knowledge-producing practice. This involves not only attention toward strictly academic and scientific settings, but also relates to how data sonification ventures are being communicated within broader societal, cultural and art institutional contexts.
  open exposition comments (1)