Research Catalogue

Research project at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Unarchiving Nono (2017 – 2022) by Ellen Røed and Bjørnar Habbestad operates as a form of comment or intervention on archiving musical material hidden away from an acoustic everyday life. The project has developed through a method where human memory is examined and activated as a carrier of the musical material, and where musical material is moved out of the archive and unfolded into a local reality. Through an iterative process of listening, remembering and performing each performance is influenced by a new layer of spatial acoustics and everyday sounds, stored with the musical performance, gradually building up to trandform the musical material by spatial layering.

Språktap er en vanlig konsekvens av okkupasjon, fordriving og flukt. I Halo of Shame utforsker Shwan Dler Qaradaki hvordan den politiske undertrykkelsen av kurdisk – hans morsmål - har formet hans kunstneriske praksis. Med inspirasjon fra både vestlig klassisk kunst og islamsk miniatyrkunst skaper han et visuelt uttrykk som balanserer mellom øst og vest, fortid og nåtid, objekt og subjekt. Gjennom dette arbeidet utvikler han et dekolonialt bildespråk som kan romme de komplekse lagene av identitet, erfaring og motstand. Veiledere: Tiril Schrøder: 2021-2025 Merete Røstad: 2021-2023 Ane Hjort Guttu: 2023-2025 Web disegner: Ellen Palmeira Bilder, video, tekst og tegninger: Shwan Dler Qaradaki

Abstract This exposition investigates musically framed silence by extracting and analyzing auditory data and proposing new analytical strategies to deepen engagement with silence as a compositional element. It reontologizes ambient sound as capable of bearing musical and narrative significance. The study centres on Cageance (accessible at https://cageance.webflow.io)¹, the author’s web-based international collaboration extending John Cage’s 4′33″, exploring how chance-generated environmental sound may function ecologically, musically, and narratively. Using a Cageance performance recorded in Portugal as a case study, the research applies a multimodal analytical framework combining Schaferian soundscape theory, conventional musical analysis (including Schenkerian reduction), and dramatic analysis. Visual mapping methods classify sounds into soundmarks, signals, keynotes, and ecological categories (biophony, geophony, anthrophony), while revealing emergent musical and dramaturgical properties within the soundscape. The study proposes new notational and analytical approaches for non-composed sound, positioning silence not as absence, but as a generative site for compositional and narrative inquiry. These findings contribute to ongoing discourse in sound studies, ecological musicology, and practice-as-research methodologies. ¹ The Cageance platform functions best on tablet or desktop devices; headphones are recommended.

By combining text and three video essays, this contribution presents a multimodal ethnography of loudspeakers in the Roma neighborhood of a Romanian village. It is based on video recordings, which were left out of the analysis and editing of my documentary films because of sound distortion. Revisiting my fieldnotes and the “ethnographic rubbish,” here I establish a critical study of my initial position – for 15 years I wasn’t paying attention to loudspeakers as an object of study in their own right – and I argue how these sounds have become auditory markers of the neighborhood since, at least, the beginning of the 2000s. The article thereby contributes to the fields of both anthropology and sound studies. It shows how the use of loudspeakers is made up of rivalry, interference, fame, fraternity, and familism. Moreover, the analysis shows how the lines between public and private spaces, and between oblique listening and noise cancellation are continually reconfigured in a community obsessed with mutual acquaintance.

This article provides an overview and analysis of transformations of the Belarusian political soundscape. Based on the author’s archive of audio recordings made in Minsk and other Belarusian cities in 2016-2023, the article analyzes how protesters and the authorities used voices, noises, and music during the major political protests of recent years. The field recordings became the starting points for a further discussion on the multifaceted role of sound, music, and silence in contesting for urban and political space in Belarus. The “loudest” period in the country’s recent history is then put in a wider context of studying the clashing ideologies of the authoritarian regime and the democratic, pro-independence movement. The study of audio materials is accompanied by participant observations, interviews, and an extensive analysis of Belarusian and international media that reveal various sonic practices used by the country’s and its critics. The primary goal of this article is to address the gaps in studies of the contemporary Belarusian political soundscape and independent music scenes.