Home page JSS
(2024)
author(s): Journal of Sonic Studies
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies
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.
JSS TOCs
(2024)
author(s): Journal of Sonic Studies
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Table of contents JSS issues
(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.
How to Fail a Field Recording. An Ethnomusicologist’s Perspective
(2024)
author(s): Victor A. Stoichita
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper reflects on the relation between “field” and “recording” in listening to “field recordings.” It is rooted in the author’s experience as a student and, subsequently, a researcher in the anthropology of music. The paper strives to map the gap between academic and artistic conceptions of field recording by asking whether and how field recordings can be failed. The author’s own experience with the genre is indeed one of frequent disenchantment. The paper identifies different meanings of field, discusses how recordings are supposed to make those fields available to the listener, and asks whether in field recording “music” and “soundscapes” should be treated as different kinds of objects.