Victor A. Stoichita

en

Victor A. Stoichiță is anthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Paris Nanterre. He investigated notions of “tricks,” “cunning,” and “slyness” used by Romanian Rom musicians in relation to musical structures. He worked on virtuosity, intellectual property, irony in live musical settings, and also published a Romani songbook for pedagogical use. His current research deals with the ontology of musical experience and the distributions of agency between humans and sound structures.

research

research expositions

  • 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.
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