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- Convenors:
-
Carlo Cubero
(Tallinn University)
Pablo D Herrera Veitia (University of Toronto)
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 0G/026
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This listening session features sound works that express the way in which listening generates experiences and indicate how the future may sound like. The programme will address how people experience continuities and frictions “in common” and how sounds play a role in imagining future socialites.
Long Abstract:
This programme will present sound works that, through their content or form, engage with notions of the “common” and the “uncommon” and reflect on what the future might sound like. The sound programme will consider how individuals and groups experience continuities, frictions, dissonances, and harmony in the process of developing narratives of hope and transformation. The listening session will explore these issues through the presentation of original sound works and discussion with their authors.
The session will focus on the relational character of sound, rather than understand sound as an object of nature, and discuss the different levels of experience that are elicited in practices of listening, designing, and presentation of sonic works. To “listen”, in this context, suggests an active process that generates transformative relationships in-sound. The programme will focus on sound works that have been generated through forms of active socializing and strive to reveal different textures and emotions about the world we live in and the world we ought to be part of.
We are looking for participants to share their original sound work during the panel. If interested in submitting a sound work (compositions, arrangements, storytelling, voice, etc.), please:
*use the proposal system to provide a short and longer description of your sound project/work;
*confirm in your description that you are the recorder/author of the recordings and/or own full rights of the work;
*provide a technical description: e.g. how many channels are needed for presentation, any visual accompaniments, etc. and other technical information about the clip.
*Finally, send your sound clip (in wav/mp3 format) - which should be no longer than 10-12 min - to pablo.herreraveitia(at)utoronton.ca
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
A piece of sonic ethnography dealing with conflict over the acoustic space of a Catholic pilgrimage in Basilicata, Italy. Here, sounds can bring people together in common sonic devotion but also highlight frictions on the proper ways to relate to the sacred and the future of tradition.
Paper long abstract:
This piece is an original composition of field recordings I made between 2014 and 2016 during different mountain pilgrimages in Basilicata, Southern Italy. It uses strategies of juxtaposition to foreground contrasts and conflict over the common spaces that pilgrims share in and around the sanctuary. The shouts of the players of 'morra' set the scene for the camps where pilgrims spend the night, cook, sing and pray. A brief soundwalk around the sanctuary showcases the diversity of the pilgrims' "sonic devotion" (Scaldaferri 2006), only to be interrupted by the loudspeakers broadcasting the priest inside the church. Shortly afterwards, the sanctuary is the setting for a conflict that involves the police versus some musicians and their devotional songs.
The composition makes the point that it is in sound that people gather to perform embodied modalities of relating to the sacred, and that it is in sound that frictions and transformative relationships are played out. As I wrote in 'Sonic Ethnography' (Ferrarini and Scaldaferri 2020), the historical evolution of these festivals shows that their future is at stake in the negotiation of the co-existence of their different sound elements in a common acoustic space.
Paper short abstract:
Hyde Park Asunder articulates three sonic fields in a gentrifying neighborhood in Chicago, USA: the staccato hammering of construction sites, the call-and-response of a political demonstration for rent control, and the ecstatic soundtrack of house, disco, and rap music broadcast through car windows.
Paper long abstract:
Hyde Park Asunder articulates three sonic fields in a gentrifying neighborhood in Chicago, USA: the staccato hammering of construction sites, the call-and-response of a political demonstration for rent control, and the ecstatic soundtrack of house, disco, and rap music broadcast through car windows.
I call these three fields “Profit,” “Politics,” and “Party” to suggest that the neighborhood soundscape is comprised of overlapping, and at times antagonistic, fantasies about the neighborhood as a form of community. Each fantasy of community entails a different form of participation in communal life: (1) the neighborhood as an entity to be exploited for profit, in which participation in the community entails economic intercourse (2) the neighborhood as a political community, in which participation takes the form of petitioning the local government for public services (in this case, lifting a municipal ban on rent control), and (3) the neighborhood as a party, in which a community is constituted by spontaneous social practices and aesthetic performances such as broadcasting music from car windows; participation in the party merely requires one’s presence at it.
Composed entirely of field recordings made in 2018-2019, Hyde Park Asunder takes its name from a classic House track, “Let No Man Put Asunder,” in which a longing for romance is heard as the desire for a home, or a neighborhood, still intact: "It's not over."
Paper short abstract:
Captured in Flores, Azores most-western island and UNESCO Biosphere reserve, this soundscape interrogates the meanings and imaginaries of conservation areas. The piece depicts the encounters and frictions between tourists, ethnographer, and non-humans in one "natural" heritage site.
Paper long abstract:
The first minutes of this soundscape account essentially for the biophonies and geophonies between Lagoa Funda and Lagoa Rasa, a Natural Heritage Site in Flores island. Unidentified birds, flies and seagulls, the sea at a distance, the wind, a storm in the horizon, a pick-up loaded with cows that suddenly traverses such sonic environment, as well as other inaudible, undisclosed, perhaps otherworldly sounds, constitute the first part of this macro-cosmic composition. Then, three vans loaded with some 30 tourists bring a set of anthrophonies (engines, mechanic doors, photo camera clicks, noises from cookie packs, small talk) that gradually muffle the previous "natural" symphony.
Considerations related to what could be heard in that geography are triggered by my presence. Had they visited this site to hear the birds they did not allow to be heard? What one hears is related to what one believes should be heard, as well as what one thinks about the nature of sounds — be them voices, birds (migratory and otherwise), if not the very "nature" (cf. Helmreich 2015). Soundscapes can be defined as the "totality of all sounds within a location with an emphasis in the relationship between individual's or society's perception of, understanding of and interaction with the sonic environment" (Payne et al 2009). "Those white spots are birds" therefore interrogates the extent to which bio-, geo- and anthrophonies are part and parcel of the ecological acoustics of conservation places as well as the (im)possibilities of a shared (sonic) universe.
Paper short abstract:
I am patching my fieldrecordings to see how isolated listening experiences woven together can help think scale and spacial as well as temporal entanglements that give shape to the landscape of climate disaster. Can sound be one of the tools to help gain insight into the patchwork of Anthropocene?
Paper long abstract:
While conducting my current fieldwork, I am recording several types of stories: stories those that live here tell me, stories that various nonhuman participants - animal, plant and others - of this landscape weave, as well as stories that the elements convey.
Whenever the human stories are in disarray or I find myself in too much of confusion, I climb the mountains to record those nonhuman stories. The soundscapes I collect and archive, in my chaotic way, to me are glimpses of brief time and space, which help disentangle the pluriverse. At the same time, they hold data that opens further: other worlds, other -verses. Hence the sounds in my practice at present are data and method at the same time.
I've put some of those sounds into a stereo composition, framing and putting forth some things I feel willing to focus on, while pushing to the background some others, in the same way one does when writing, or working with the light and sharpness of the image. I am listening to hear if sounds that surround us can help think about the scale and time aspects of climate disaster which drew me into this particular space in time in the first place.
Paper short abstract:
Considering that our bodies resonate with sounds, and that sound environments are what make us move, live and evolve, in the context of migration, I wonder how migrants adapt to the new soundscapes they encounter. What can they perceive in the new worlds they arrive in?
Paper long abstract:
For the last 10 years, my ethnographical research is based on performance & narrative apparatuses. For Sounding Bodies, I developed an experimental research program for migrant children staying at a Red Cross shelter in Paris.
Throughout a series of workshops, I invited them to collect sounds. I then conceived an apparatus for motion sensors to play [with] and perform soundscapes. What kind of sounds have they collected? And how did their body manifest a soundscape?
Two concepts will be at work in my proposal: The one of cosmophanies, described by Augustin Berque, and the other of ethnoscapes, defined by Arjun Appadurai.
The word cosmophany refers to the Greek Cosmos and to the verb φαίνω (phainò), which means: "to manifest, to appear, to be obvious". Related to the act of migration, ethnoscapes are those landscapes that migrants recompose with their communities.
If, to every individual corresponds a way of seeing, and ethnoscapes are formed by moving groups, how do people resonate with sounds? Resonate in the sense of moving, playing, acting, making decisions throughout one's life. And how to transmit sound perception? In other words, how can we imagine designing a sound environment for a better future?
My idea would be to postulate new forms of soundscapes, as spaces of repair or spaces of mediation between the world migrants are entering and the one, they have left. My argument is based on the fact that perception is a cultural process, which we can learn and pass on.
Paper short abstract:
In this soundscape Van der Velde takes us on a city walk. What we hear is an attempt to harmonise the penetrative sounds of the outside world that reverberates and permeates our bodies and being. Can we transform this intrusive effect by reading the outside public landscape as an invitation to interplay, harmonise and react?
Paper long abstract:
On a short city walk Van der Velde takes us on auditive journey, where we move from the familiar sounds of the inside, the private, to the outside, public. What we hear is an attempt to harmonise the penetrative sounds of the outside world that reverberates and permeates our bodies and being.
During the corona pandemic The Netherlands, as many other places in the world, was in
lockdown. With curfews, avoiding contact and movement, the streets were silent and empty. As
spring approaches and restrictions fall away, the city is now at full bloom again. How can we
manage these changes, from still to running, from inside to outside?
When stepping out of our homes, we are immediately part of the raging outside world.
Here sounds, movement, objects are encountered by us, and we are caught in a balancing act, a dance with the outer. This public domain, is of no-one and of all. We must and will form it
together, as we all alter the outer reality.
Can we transform the intrusive effect of the public domain by reading the outside sound
landscape as an invitation to play, harmonise and react? For we are not a numb, static being, that sound is reflected upon, but we are an actor, we take in and are permeated by the vibrations. It is our choice how we react and send back to the outside world. For we have the agency and power to transform the living world around us, even with something as small as a fleeting sound.