Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic work in the digitising sensorium of the Indian state, and drawing on sound studies, linguistic anthropology and affect theory, this paper describes how the materiality of digital communication platforms produce sonic affects and the presentation of authoritative selves.

Paper long abstract:

In August 2018, a forty-eight old man, who goes by the initials KG, took on the position of a senior bureaucrat in southern India. A few weeks into taking office he introduced a weekly conference call with over 300 of his subordinates, called grptlk (short for group talk) after the name of the mobile phone application (app) that powered these calls. Using a combination of classic leased line telecommunication and the flexibility of control offered by the app, KG used grptlk to speak to his myriad subordinates located in different parts of the district, all at once. Beyond offering an opportunity for making work more efficient, grptlk allowed KG to produce what the anthropologist of media, Brian Larkin calls “modes of affect, desire, fantasy, and devotion”.

Drawing on scholarship in sound studies, linguistic anthropology and affect theory, this paper aims to understand how the materiality of digital communication platforms, that is the techno-social connections between people, technologies, and sensory forms, produced a sonic environment that allowed for the presentation of a bureaucratic self that was unseen in the pre-digital? Through what technopolitics did the voice platform silence 'noisy' offices and in turn produce its own sonic affects among its listeners? These inquiries are made in the context of a general re-emergence of orality in the age of the digital through instances such as podcasts, voice texting, and artificial intelligence.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

How can the un-speakable regulatory regimes of genre, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, sedimented in long histories of intergenerational harm, be heard and seen anew? Decolonial activist's mobilize techniques of somatic experiencing as a way of unraveling affective residues of historical injustice.

Paper long abstract:

What are the ways of listening to the affective intensities of intergenerational harm? What does it mean to listen to what lies beyond verbal articulation, and how can such endeavors be accomplished? How can the un-speakable regulatory regimes of genre, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, sedimented in long histories of intergenerational harm, be heard and seen anew? This paper explores how Dutch-Indonesian decolonial activists mobilize techniques of somatic experiencing as a way of listening to and unraveling affective residues of historical injustice understood to be lodged in individual and collective bodies.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Paris, this talk explores the difficulties of knowing a new type of noise called recreational noise, of turning human noises into environmental noises, and what the uneasy tension between observing and listening can tell us about noise and urban life.

Paper long abstract:

Since the EU’s Environmental Noise Directive (END) was established in 2002, noise pollution has become a leading atmospheric risk and public health concern (UNEP 2022). As the END tuned attention to the “mechanical” (Bijsterveld 2008) sounds and sources (airplane, road, railway) of environmental noise, it neglected another source: humans. The chatter from terraces, the music of portable stereos, street performers, tourists, or the sonic disturbances of what has been called “recreational noise” (Revol, Bernfeld, Mietlicki 2022) are central to noise issues within many European cities, and yet lacks standardised techniques for their measurement; it is not visible in official noise data or noise maps. While this source of noise was primary to the earliest anti-noise campaigns (Mansell 2016; Schwartz 2011), it does not easily fold into the now dominant categories of “environmental noise” or “noise pollution”. In Paris, recreational noise has become central to the city’s “struggle against noise,” gathering around it, resident associations (e.g. Droit au Sommeil), politicians, and institutional and infrastructural responses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a noise observatory (Bruitparif), city officials, and resident associations in Paris, and learning from their respective mapping techniques and expertise, this talk seeks to explore the difficulties of turning human noises into environmental noises and of producing “objective” knowledge through technologies, expertise, and inscriptions, and their contestation. Ultimately, the talk is interested in the uneasy tension between observing and listening (Peterson 2021), and what this uneasiness can tell us about noise and the epistemological challenges of listening to it.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, part of a work in progress, I analyze the neighborhood of Caju, in the Port Zone of Rio de Janeiro, through its sounds and silences. This means claiming various types of sounds, as well as their absence, as a way to access the aspects of urban everyday life trough atmospheric readings

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, part of a work in progress, I analyze the neighborhood of Caju, in the Port Zone of Rio de Janeiro, through its sounds and silences. This means claiming various types of sounds, as well as their absence, as a way to access the aspects of urban everyday life (Vedana 2010; 2018). Located facing Guanabara Bay and next to the Avenida Brasil, Ponte Rio–Niterói (Ponte Pres. Costa e Silva) and Linha Vermelha (Via Expressa Pres. João Goulart) expressways, Caju has residential, industrial and fishing occupations. These infrastructures are alongside cemeteries, military and waste treatment facilities. The area is also occupied by a drug trafficking faction, with conflicts sometimes occurring due to territorial disputes with other armed groups or government security forces. These aspects are entangled in the creation of a topography of everyday sensibilities (Stewart, 2011), making residents and workers navigate daily life through anticipations and atmospheric readings (Cavalcanti, 2008; Menezes, 2023). Through interviews and participant observations, I plan to understand the effects of these infrastructures, focusing on sound aspects, in the everyday life of workers and residents of Caju.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

What of the hunger for quiet associated with lake tourism? “Listening otherwise” offers a way to think critically about the “hunger for quiet” that I have come across in my fieldwork in the Okanagan Lake tourism region, in unceded and ancestral territory of the Syilx (Okanagan).

Paper long abstract:

What of the hunger for quiet or near-silence associated with lake tourism? Particular sonic atmospheres in lakes that serve as recreational sites in the warm summer months in southern Canada are seen both as individual desires and a humanistic drive. More than an aesthetic to be enjoyed by individuals though, lakes are affective, material, corporeal, climatic, sensory, and ‘haunting’ atmospheres for tourists who enjoy them, as well as for tourists who are not authorized to enjoy them. Lakes, and beaches, private piers, and other geographies by which humans unequally access them, emit different sounds, and are heard differently, according to human bodies, bodies of matter, etc., that co-inhabit them. Robinson’s “listening otherwise” (2020) offer ways to think about the “hunger for quiet” that I have come across in my fieldwork in the Okanagan Lake tourism region, in unceded and ancestral territory of the Syilx (Okanagan). Listening otherwise is an anticolonial mode of listening to counteract the single-sense, fixating, consumptive, and “hungry” listening practices underpinning settler positionality. This approach to listening relationally complicates the otherwise dominant settler-tourist narrative about summer lake tourism in southern BC, Canada, and the normative desire for a naturalize quiet. Other actors and listening subjects complicate and also turn my attention to the politics of sound in tourism spaces, including quiet, that can disturb “forms of coloniality that remain unchallenged in touristic relations” (Harewood 2019).

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among student activists in the US and Denmark we shift the attention from (free) speech to the act of listening and argue that central to students’ activism is the development of a ‘critical listening positionality’ as a continuous ethical practice.

Paper long abstract:

”… having had this conversation with these students (…) just from listening to them about what a distraction it [the N-word] is, and how much pain is caused - I’ve decided not to use this example in class. (…) That’s why this a great example of free speech, which means not only talking, but also listening” (Prof. Geoffrey Stone in Flaherty 2019)“

In countries like the US and Denmark, student activism to promote social justice at the university has led to vivid debate about free speech, not least because of student activists’ attention to language, including the role of harmful words (like the N-word above), use of pronouns and people-first language. These debates tend to focus on speech and expression, revolving around individuals’ rights to voice their opinions, notions of silencing and keeping a civil tone. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from the USA and Denmark and theories on listening in pedagogical and political settings (Lempert forthcoming, Dobson 2014) this paper homes in on the role of listening in students’ activism. We show how attention to, and care for listening, not just hearing, marks activist spaces with a wish for others and themselves to develop, learn and grow from what is heard, i.e. developing a certain form of ‘critical listening positionality’ (Robinson 2020). Listening thereby becomes a continuous ethical practice in which the intention behind an utterance and behind a listening act shape the assessment and learning potential of the encounter.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

In ethnographic interviews museum staff used sonic metaphors to talk about how populist culture wars impact their work. This paper explores the salience of these metaphors, asking what it demonstrates about the felt experience of populism and how staff cut through the noise to hear and be heard.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the impact of populism in European museums, specifically focusing on the metaphor of "noisiness" as a key element of its manifestation. In an ethnographic interview study conducted with museum practitioners across Germany, Poland and the UK, metaphors of sound and noise were used by interviewees to make sense of the way the populist culture wars have impacted their work. Using a close-language analysis of these sonic metaphors, we draw on anthropological literature of metaphors, as well as the anthropology of populism, to show how museum staff feel their work is silenced by a noisy critical minority. The paper asks why this metaphor is salient and how it helps us to understand the slippery concept of populism. We explore how museum staff work hard but quietly to push back against this noisy political climate, looking at what strategies they employ to listen and be listened to, paying particular attention to the practice of listening as an act of recognition for silenced groups. We ask: why does this metaphor continue to crop up? What does this tell us about the felt experience of populism in museums? How do practitioners cut through the noise to hear others and be heard?

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Contemporary Swiss folk musicians are often sonically categorized as 'modern' or 'traditional', yet these labels are also bound with sociopolitical identities, as the music is made sense of through socially-entrenched forms of listening, sounding, and participation within particular environments.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of renewed interest in traditional practices in recent years, contemporary folk musicians in Switzerland are often glibly categorized as 'modern' or 'traditional', aligning them and their music with particular sonic, and sociopolitical, identities. Yet these labels are often as much a reflection of the context, engagement parameters, and listening expectations associated with the music as they are indicators of genre or form. Space and sound are made sense of through socially-entrenched forms of learning, hearing, and recognition—critical elements of folk music practice which connect to modes of sociality and participation outside of musical bounds. Musicians and participants themselves may be variable, but it is these spaces and the behaviours that take place within them which situate the music socially and aesthetically. A ‘traditional’ folk music context is often characterized by informality and exuberant clamour, including talking, drinking, eating, dancing, or taking part musically. ‘New’ folk music, on the other hand, is almost exclusively found in formal performance settings and is often attended by cosmopolitan audiences, familiar with the anticipated stillness and resonance of a concert hall. These specific types of sounds and listening practices have become bound with identities and ideologies, associated with both the musicians and attendant communities. As themes of heritage, place, and belonging continue to figure prominently in global debates, these mundane acts of listening become central to broader discourses and politics of participation.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper tells of a sound project involving schoolchildren recording sounds of their island

Paper long abstract:

The island of Apiao, with around 600 inhabitants, is a small island belonging to the Chiloé archipelago, Chile. Given its isolated location from both the region and the country, this town presents a series of cultural and environmental peculiarities. One of these aspects is its sound. The presence of the coast, the wind, the rain, the animals, the silence and the vastness of the landscape make Apiao a place with great, powerful sounds.

This article addresses, as a methodological case, the development of a collective soundscape recently carried out with schoolchildren and adolescents from Apiao. Through workshops that involved conscious listening exercises, use of recording equipment, collective recording in different areas of the island and the subsequent editing of the recorded sound material, a polyphonic documentary landscape of the island was formed. Between voices, children's plays, birds, sea and wind, the power and particularity of a landscape appears from the sensibility of the children that inhabit it. The article works in a multimodal way, reflecting on the potential of sound in research-creation projects from a collaborative perspective - challenging oculocentric and adult-centric notions -, and at the same time, presents the results of this experience in audio format.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

By examining the historical, cultural, and social dimensions of street cries, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities inherent in urban soundscapes and the need for equitable noise regulation practices that uphold the rights of all citizens.

Paper long abstract:

Street cries, patter, pitch, or spiel – these terms encompass the verbal strategies employed by traders to enhance their sales potential in marketplaces. These utterances, ranging from impromptu calls to premeditated announcements, have accompanied market traders since the dawn of urban civilizations, when their voices served as the sole means of communicating product offerings. While pitching remains prevalent in certain street markets, particularly in southern Europe and the Global South, marketplaces increasingly face a silencing discourse aimed at reducing urban noise levels. This trend raises a critical question of social justice: how do we reconcile with the inherent 'noise' associated with certain professions? While the din of factories, roadworks, or airplanes is generally tolerated due to their economic contributions, the sounds emitted by individuals striving to eke out a living through their acoustic tactics are often subjected to suppression.

This paper, with a primary focus on Spain, delves into the historical treatment of street cries through literature review, analyzing their perception in diverse sociocultural contexts and their gradual prohibition in various parts of the world. The second section draws upon empirical data gathered during a three-year research project to provide evidence of the sonic injustice that noise regulation can inflict upon those whose sounds are suppressed. Finally, the paper concludes by advocating for participatory policymaking practices in noise regulation, emphasizing pedagogy and a shared understanding of the common good, given the highly subjective and social nature of noise perception.