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- Convenors:
-
Piotr Cichocki
(University of Warsaw)
Anton Nikolotov
Ayda Melika (University of California, Berkeley)
- Stream:
- Moving bodies: Sounds and Resonance/Corps mouvants: Sons et résonnance
- Location:
- MRT 219
- Start time:
- 4 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Sounds travel, move, link and transform. This panel explores how sound is instrumentalized, objectified and how it "leaks" to produce noise and overload. We invite to discuss the way sound enables a unique perspective on the current de-globalizing world and central questions of ethnographic methods.
Long Abstract:
Sounds travel, move, and transform, linking utterers and auditors, coders and decoders, producers and consumers in a range of power relations causing various movements and ways of becoming. Ethnographers focusing on sound enable a unique perspective on the current de-globalizing world and the central theoretical discussions on ethnographic methods. This panel aims to incite dialogue on how sound is instrumentalized and objectified as well as how it "leaks" to produces noise, disjunction and overload. Scholars and practice-based researchers are invited to explore with us the following:
- performances and (dis)-embodiments of sound as mobile social practices that allow circulation between different cultural, political, ecological and economic contexts;
- sound as an affective movement and sound recordings as a process of objectification of this movement as is the case with music and information industries;
- recordings and sound technologies as travelling objects, powerful actors, socio-technical assemblages (such as radio astronomy and ipod players) that enable new ways of registration, amplification and experience.
Questioning the status of field recordings as merely data evidence, we will address their methodological entanglement. Beyond its role as a signal carrying information, how can sound be seen as a form of spectrality (Bonett 2016), tactility and atmospheric embodiment or fictitious futurity, alternative histories (Eshun 2010) or "audiotopia" (Kun 2005)? We will discuss how "resonance" is part of our ethical relations of attachment and detachment (Candea 2015) with our interlocutors. Inclusion of recordings or performances is not required but encouraged (Please add link to proposal).
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The processes of formation, change, and reinvention of urban soundscapes today are linked different forms of mobility, the constant crossing of national, social and cultural boundaries by actors at different levels. The research was conducted using the example of Saint-Petersburg public places.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on anthropological research project, which focuses on formation of urban soundscapes in contexts of mobility.
Spatial relations are one of the central variable influencing human behaviour and cognition. Sonic landscapes, or "soundscapes" (Colombijn 2007) is not obvious. Sounds are indexal relation to what represented. The soundscape is influenced by social, cultural and historical contexts. The perception of sound is also based by memory, personal experience and the media streams of images (musical themes, styles and trends, as well as sound images of TV, etc.). Cultural and symbolic forms of indirect perception of sound and noise of the city is extremely diverse.
The soundscapes of Saint-Petersburg are discrete and variable. Their characteristics determined by the infrastructure and activities of various social agents distributed in time. The resource for design scape becomes situational reification cultural experience of the agents that is tied to the perception of sounds - it comes from due to the concentration of global cultural and symbolic flows of cultural practices.
The emergence of new social forms of mobility defines the basic characteristics of the city soundscape. Sounds give impulses triggering characteristic of a locus of urban space chain of actions, specify the boundaries of the interaction, become a kind of social filter, contribute to shift the focus of, interpretation of various socio-cultural processes, are the basis for identification in the space of the city, a resource for the formation of urban localization.
Paper short abstract:
Sound might be considered not only from the auditory perspective (listening), but also from the perspective of its (re)production and distribution. I will look more closely at fieldrecording as a cultural practice that reveals what is socially audible and recognised as meaningful and worth attention
Paper long abstract:
The subject of my paper is fieldrecording as the sound practice that nowadays is gaining increasingly more popularity. We can observe effects of this practice in two contexts: 1. On the websites dedicated to digital sound production; 2. During the activities accompanying various artistic, cultural and educational events. I will consider the first context in which I participate as a fieldrecordist who uses sound recording as a non-visual method of (audio)anthropology. I will use perspectives of the anthropology of sound, acoustemology and acoustic ecology. My goal is to look into the fieldrecording as a category of socio-cultural practice related to the technological development and growing significance of sound production, and more generally, to the global process of sounding the western, mainly urban, culture.
Websites dedicated to audio recordings are used to publish and share sounds very often collected by tourists and other travellers, who catch sounds in the same way as they take photographs. These recordings are brought from different places, exotic tours, business, sightseeing trips, or just sentimental journeys. The example of fieldrecording practices encourages a broader reflection on the status of sounds, why some of them are audible and others are not, how new technologies influence the process of democratisation of senses, and raise the public awareness of the importance of acoustic space. Moreover, the phenomenon of tourist fieldrecording makes it possible to take a closer look at the stereotypical hearing and listening, as well as the cultural mechanisms of exoticising non-European/non-urban soundscapes.
Paper short abstract:
We believe artistic and scientific expressions derive from the same questioning of reality of its perceptions, of our state of consciousness; and those expressions intend to generate sense beyond reality, beyond otherness.
Paper long abstract:
We believe artistic and scientific expressions derive from the same questioning of reality of its perceptions, of our state of consciousness. We pay attention to disruptive narratives that part from a linear expression of our connections to reality.
How do those audio, physical and mediatized narratives take into consideration the infinite realities of the world, give us a reading of their presence in our lives through the new opportunities offered by digital technologies. In order to pursue our research on the power of the sound to render such complex realities we conceived a soundspace (5.0) recording in a monastery in order to give a chance to the listener to feel and to understand the relationships between the monks, the prayers and the music. This soundspace has been presented at Musée du Quai Branly in an interactive way and now we almost finished the conception of an installation in 5.1, I can easily present an excerpts with my computer. These research are part of a program Labex Hastec on the Techniques Of (Making) Believe and we work on the technical objects, the machine-tools (magic lanterns, cameras, microphones computers, etc.) created to give credit to beliefs, demonstrate them, and transform them into knowledge. How the sound, in an academic surrounding which emphasizes finally its key role in the production of knowledge but also of sensation, is analysed, perceived and used.
Paper short abstract:
Refering to what J. Kun have called „audiotopia”, I discuss music and sound as spatial, technologic and performative practice. I analyze music performances from northern Malawi, as creation of invisible, momentary space for individuals to re-construct identity in process of healing and revelation.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I examine the anthropological conception of music and sound by concentrating on a problem of spatial, technological and performative aspects and on what Josh Kun have called "audiotopia" (2005). I argue that instead of understanding music as a representation of social change, process or dynamics, the anthropology of music should engage on autonomous qualities of sound, its role in social configurations, its impact on other objects and beings (Prior 2011). One of such a feature is ability of music to set invisible spaces of encounter and transformation for social, material and spiritual actors.
I analyze musical and religious practices among the Tumbuka people in northern region of Malawi, namely vimbuza, which is related to possesion cult, and electronic gospel music, produced by my interlocutors or "imported" from other african countries. I argue that both vimbuza and gospel, which I undestand as multilayered phenomenons, composed of sound, words, dance, costumes, media, technologies, spirits, create social momentary spaces which allows individual to experience a spiritual realm and re-construct identity in process of healing, revelation, a discussion with spirits.
Vimbuza and gospel are seen as contradictions by Malawians. The first is performed as a therapy to pacify capricious spirits, when varied practices of gospel music are understood as space of contact with christian Holy Spirit. Neverthless both create spaces of momentary contact with the invisible.