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- Convenors:
-
Bernd Brabec
(University of Innsbruck)
Matthias Lewy (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts)
Victor A. Stoichita (CNRS (LESC/CREM))
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
The value of imagination and fiction in writing and performing music and sound research deserves scrutiny and critical examination. We welcome reports about experiments and best practice suggestions for methods of doing and undoing science and fiction in, and beyond, music and sound scholarship.
Long Abstract:
Contemporary anthropological and ethnomusicological research in music and sound is often complemented by artistic research and writing methods. The ambiguous nature of the research object—music—invites artistic experiments that may generate certainties and knowledge where scholarly methods are challenged. For example, asymmetrical power relations among researchers, the researched, and research funders demand ethical considerations. Epistemological or ontological incommensurability awaits translation and communication; often, one stakeholder’s “reality” appears as “fiction” to the other. For instance, Indigenous ritual songs are often directed towards or stem from “the spirits”—entities that carry a fictitious quality for most research funders. Can fiction help bridge the gap between their requirements for “innovation” and those of collaborative ethnography, where researchers should ideally “not say anything above” of what the research partners have to say (Lassiter 2005:14)? In some situations, researchers cannot openly speak while preserving their associates’ safety. Michael Taussig proposed writing in a “fairytale mode” to protect individuals but also “to heighten, not to diminish, reality” (2012:ix). In contemporary art music composition, AI and “black box” algorithms are increasingly used to heighten creativity; dealing with them can be reminiscent of the ways Indigenous ritualists handle the “fictitious” spirits. Anticipation is another exercise in imagination where social sciences meet fictional writing: Futurology recently received increased interest in anthropology (e.g., “Futurofolies,” Terrain 79, 2023). How can music, as a realm of sonic fiction, be combined with writing to envision alternate versions of the future? Can arts and performance aid to more symmetrically generate and warrant knowledge?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -Bernhard Bleibinger (Institución Milà y Fontanals de investigación en Humanidades (IMF-CSIC), Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
During and after artistic and ethno-/musicological field research all role players involved select, provide and use data which reflects their personal realities and is subject to their sovereignty of opinion. This purposely made selection has an impact on the creation of art, fiction and science.
Paper long abstract:
Field work, including ethnomusicological fieldwork, is widely defined as an activity aiming at the collection of data which is subsequently analysed and interpreted. But when entering the field one also enters a political arena in which all participating role players hold specific positions and are subject to power relations which may impact the selection of data to be collected during the research. Depending on the status (e.g. age group, political status) or role they play in a community cultural consultants, as will be shown, may be in possession of a certain sovereignty of opinion which allows them to select and pre-interpret (but also comment) data. Researchers may therefore be confronted with individual opinion or even manipulating fiction where they expect “facts”. On the other side of the field, researchers themselves possess a status which provides them with a certain sovereignty of interpretation which, after a rigid analysis of data, may lead to scientific results, but also to new (science-)fiction – both contributing to and being part of a mystification of the researched and the researchers which occasionally takes place at universities. On the basis of examples from Southern Africa and the academic world I will explain some of the ideas outlined above and offer some suggestions for a better practice.
Lorenzo Ferrarini (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Composition can intensify the evocative potential of field recordings and even develop ethnographic arguments in the acoustic medium. As a process of artistic origin, it can enrich a social science such as the anthropology of sound, if accompanied by collaborative processes.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation examines the concept of composition as a research method of artistic provenance that affords fictional characteristics to field recordings. Inspired by recent work by Steven Feld and based on an ongoing project that will result in a multichannel immersive audio installation, I stress four devices of composing with field recordings for multi-channel: time condensation, representation of space, layering and rendition of points of listening. Through these devices, compositions can evoke space and experience and even develop arguments in sound. Further, the process of composition can be supplemented by collaborative methodologies that can move the accent from the ethnographer’s perception to shared histories of listening.
Since 2004 I have been part of ongoing team research at the Maggio festival in Accettura, southern Italy, where inhabitants bring from the woods and lift in the town square a tree more than 30 metres tall. The festival is a whirlwind of instrumental music, songs and non-human noises of all kinds. In 2023 we recorded and filmed the festival using a variety of methods, including first-order ambisonic microphones. The combination of surround recordings and composition techniques will allow to create fictional conjunctures of time and perspectives, underlining for example the way music influenced the movement of people and animals at the festival, or the skilled listening of some protagonists in key roles. Importantly, the fictional character of these artistic interventions beyond documentation requires an opening of the compositional process to local ears, through processes of feedback and dialogic editing.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate (Goethe University)
Paper short abstract:
In American suburbia, the hum of cloud infrastructure is harming the mental and physical health of nearby residents. This multimodal presentation ethnographically reconstructs their sonic experiences, revealing echoes of settler colonialism & racism in their discourses & grassroots organizing.
Paper long abstract:
In American suburbia, the hum of cloud infrastructure is disturbing residents who insist that they are victims of noise pollution. Bolstered by media attention, they have successfully organized against the noisy data center arguing that they have an inalienable right to silence. Enumerating the myriad harms to their physiological and mental well-being that prolonged exposure to data center noise creates, residents have successfully motivated city officials to regulate the sonic output of the data center. Drawing on ethnographic research in a suburb of the greater Phoenix metro areas in Arizona USA, this multimodal presentation highlights some of the paradoxes and politics of sonic experiences and subjectivities, revealing how echoes of settler colonialism and sonoracism pervade the discourses of affected residents. Splicing field recordings with dramatizations of ethnographic interview data, this presentation invites participants to share in the sonic experiences of Chandler residents as they seek justice for their grievances. It also raises an important political, historical, and ethnographic question: what is noise and who gets to define it?
Yiou Wang (Harvard University) Chuhong Wang (Beijing University of Technology) Yujie Wang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Shaoting Zeng (Beijing University of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
Interested in how nonhuman beings perceive and interact with their environment, we designed BATOPIA, a first-person bat VR game simulating a bat’s cognitive, social, and sexual-aesthetic umwelt. Our methodology Trans-Sensory Mapping offers an approach to ethnography integrating creative technology.
Paper long abstract:
Virtual Reality (VR) is a great venue for traversing vast gaps in sensory modalities across organisms, a hindrance to empathy and the non-anthropocentric practice. Amidst the urban-rural environment plagued by noise pollution, the VR game BATOPIA features a female Greater Sac-Winged Bat in foraging, socialization, and dispersal, where the design methodology is an ethnographic inquiry explored in this paper.
Introducing Trans-Species Mapping, our methodology maps a nonhuman’s salient sense (hearing) to a human’s salient sense (vision). We distinguish between cognitive (calls) and social/sexual-aesthetic (songs) interaction mechanisms, employing VR game mechanics to recreate key aspects of a bat’s sensory modalities and scenarios, including active sensing, hunting, and obstacle avoidance. The audio rhythm is mapped to beam width and light intervals in the virtual environment. Furthermore, inspired by Elizabeth Grosz’s thought on the relationship between art and sex, we implement Niagara systems to visualize sedentary male songs to deliver the sensual affect and musical appeal of the song as experienced by the player character. Grounded in real data, our design process translates scientific concepts of bat perception to interactive mechanics, offering a unique approach to multispecies ethnography integrating creative technology and philosophy.
The primary focus is not on translating the bat's perception but on immersing the player in a constructed umwelt (phenomenal world) that mirrors the bat's experience, creating an affective virtual context where the player's self-in-the-world is comparable to the bat's self-in-the-world, in the language of new media.
Victor A. Stoichita (CNRS (LESC/CREM))
Paper short abstract:
In music and similar experiences listeners often locate agentive beings in sound. Around the Mediterranean, Makam is an example of sonic structure endowed with agency. Is it possible to envision a Makam's point of view? What does it lack to be fully a person?
Paper long abstract:
Music and a range of other auditory experiences imply peculiar links between audition and imagination. In the "enchanted listening posture" (Stoichita and Brabec de Mori 2017), people report sensing with their ears things that violate basic ontological premises: for instance colors that can be heard, or sounds that have weight. They often report as well feeling that such beings have qualities normally attached to persons, like emotions or autonomous will.
Describing sonic beings with words is notoriously difficult, as is describing musical experience in general. This is due in part to the scarcity of human vocabularies for sound. As speakers are led to use figurative talk and metaphors to circumvent their language’s limitations, many descriptions of enchanted listening end up dwelling on the fringes between sensory reality, fiction and subjective introspection. But although animistic descriptions of sound abound, I am unaware of any attempt to envision the world from the point of view of a sonic being. Is there anything like "being a sonic being", to paraphrase Nagel? Can the point of view of such a being (or its impossibility), inform us about the structure of our imagination of sound, and acoustic agency? I will propose a thought experiment based on my fieldwork with Frech musicians who try to grasp the concept of Makam, an agentive concept relevant to many musical styles in the Mediterranean.
Bernd Brabec (University of Innsbruck)
Paper short abstract:
A fictional narrative of spirits interacting with human beings in order to make the latter perform in ways favourable for the first – a reverse anthropology – sheds light on the agencies of spirits in Indigenous singing as well as the magic of AI algorithms used in art music composition.
Paper long abstract:
Among Western Amazonian Indigenous peoples, singing magical songs is the principal technique of interacting with non-human entities often referred to as ‘spirits’. Ritual specialists perform magical songs in order to manipulate circumstances; therefore, they have to either make a ‘fair deal’ with the spirits, or to trick, overthrow, or seduce them into effecting what the singer aims for. The ritual singers is a specialist in dealing with beings in different ontological layers, much like contemporary programmers and music composers who use AI algorithms for music making. Often, AIs are viewed as a ‘black box’, as entities that react/act in ways unexplorable for humans. While Indigenous councils debate whether AIs can be welcomed into their networks of kinship (Lewis & al. 2018), composers muse about the question whether the concepts of ‘magic’ and ‘spirits’ are helpful for understanding human-AI interaction (Letheren & al. 2020). This interaction involves very similar choices to the Indigenous ritualists’: one can try to use AI in a fair way, or to violate its original purpose. Algorithms can, like spirits, be tricked, and maybe even seduced.
In the presentation I am going to reverse agencies in order to relate a fictional story: what actions would the spirits take in order to effectively manipulate humans? Humanly constructed high-tech infrastructure comes up as a powerful tool and comfortable home for formerly Indigenous spirits that seek to interact with humans by making deals with them, and by overthrowing, seducing and tricking them.
Matthias Lewy (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts)
Paper short abstract:
By means of a thought experiment set in the future, historical eco-musical fragments from the GDR are explained, narrating both real and fictional ecological contamination. I show how rethinking eco-musical scenarios can be a path to overcoming existing stereotypes.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is a thought experiment set in the future. The premise is based on the concept of the Novacene (James Lovelock), hypothetically posited as a geological epoch following the Anthropocene in which artificial hyperintelligences, emerging from artificial intelligence, dominate. In this hypothetical epoch, the goal of Gaia's development is to recover from the climate change of the Anthropocene using these artificial hyperintelligences. I explore how sound phenomena and their contexts might aid these artificial hyperintelligences in understanding the ecological condition of specific regions at specific times, a shift in perspective that allows currently underrepresented or stereotyped areas, music, and related materials to come to the forefront.
The thought experiment is grounded in the concrete example of pop music discourses on sonic concepts in the 1980s in the GDR where, in the pursuit of artistic expression, bands often crafted their own instruments and created music referencing environmental pollution and associated myths. Topics ranged from real threats posed by chemical factories to rumors about secret Soviet army nuclear waste storage. The artificial hyperintelligences consider all fragments of information related to potential eco-musical activities and attribute a different political-academic significance to the unique sonic structures that emerged. Through this example of youth music in the GDR, I illustrate how this kind of hypothetical perspective can initiate processes of sonic delinking (Ismaiel-Wendt, following Mignolo), shedding new light on existing preconceptions and stereotypes