Journal of Sonic Studies
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About this portal
The portal is used to publish contributions for the online OA Journal of Sonic Studies, the storage of A/V materials, and the storage of previous issues.
contact person(s):
Marcel Cobussen ![](/rc/images/email.gif)
,
Vincent Meelberg ![](/rc/images/email.gif)
url:
http://sonicstudies.org/about
Recent Activities
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The City of Noise: an Approach to the Multiple Senses of Sound in Buenos Aires
(2020)
author(s): Facundo Petit de Murat and Martina Di Tullio
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this article we propose a historical approach to noise in Buenos Aires during the first half of the twentieth century. During this period, Buenos Aires consolidated itself materially and symbolically as a modern city. Through the study of historical documents, we identified different meanings of noise in relation to progress, health, culture, silence, space, and time. The main argument is that, at first, social imaginary associated noise to progress; however, this view rapidly changed in the search for an ideal of relative silence. In this process, some specific sonic practices started being classified as uncivilized. In this sense, the modern imaginary? delineates the boundaries of what is acoustically tolerable; this produces human subjects perceived as morally inferior, whose practices must be legally regulated. This is the context for the emergence of devices aimed at controlling and mitigating urban noise: legal norms and measuring systems that intend to regulate – albeit inefficiently – the sonic habitus.
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Sound and Politics. Shaping Current Artistic Practices in Latin America
(2020)
author(s): Lukas Kühne
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In some ways, the current political landscape of Latin America seems to mirror the condition of the world today. However, the impact achieved by the collective creativity of the pueblo, its communitarian understanding and acting, should never be underestimated. Nevertheless, Latin America does not seem to shy away from complexity or change. Without wanting to idealize, this trait can also be seen to work within arte sonoro's current artistic practices and manifestations. These subjective observations are based on my 15 years of work as an artist, curator and academic at the State University UdelaR (Universidad de la República) in Montevideo with a focus on arte sonoro in Uruguay.
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Fists Up: Orchestrating Silence in Mexico City’s Post-Earthquake Rescuing Activities
(2020)
author(s): Elisa Corona Aguilar
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
On 9 September 2017, an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale hit Mexico City, causing the collapse of more than fifty buildings and damaging many others. As the usual urban soundscape intensified with the general chaos, the collapsed buildings and their vicinities were filled with new, unusual loudness, but there was also silence, partial and momentary. It was a hope for survivors, a call to listen again and again when there were sounds of life among the ruins. Fists raised up in the air became the generalized call for silence, a way to communicate both attention and pause in the activity around a specific place. As the media spread images of the fists up and how this signal created silence, its layered meanings became present.
Through a series of interviews with participants and witnesses of the rescue activities and a compilation of journalistic text and images, I will trace the brief history and transformation of the fists up gesture, and I will explore the implications of orchestrating silence in emergency circumstances.
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Materials of Sound II
(2019)
author(s): Caleb Kelly
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This is the second issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies focused on the Materials of Sound (see issue no. 16). At the heart of these two issues is something of a twist in sonic thinking that sees the authors thinking about sound as more than sound, the opposite of Cage’s dictum of letting sound be itself – as hearing sound as sound. Instead, the materials that produce the sounds under investigation are understood as being more than the sounds that they create. Sound is not heard as innocent, pure, or transparent but rather as a part of a political ecology in which it is deeply linked to various histories and ecologies that form and hold the materials of any sound’s making.
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The Failed Assemblage of Batroun Concrète: A Biopsychosocial Approach to Post-acousmatic Composition
(2019)
author(s): Seth Ayyaz
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Batroun Concrète 2.1 - 2.9 is a sound work by the composer Seth Ayyaz. Comprised of a score for live performances interleaved with electroacoustic parts, it emerged from a residency at the Batroun Projects art space in the north of Lebanon. The performance intended for 2012 was disrupted by the early cross-border resonances of the Syrian civil war. While it failed to materialize in a final form, its conceptual design and theoretical underpinnings are relevant to thinking the complicities of composition with its material conditions, specifically regarding site-specificity, live improvisation, field recordings, and studio-based practice. The work investigated how body-related cognitive scripts might speculatively structure sonic thinking.
Wilfred Sellars’ philosophical distinction between contrasting “manifest” and “scientific” images of humankind, as discussed by thinkers such as Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, is applied here to sonic discourse. The proposed “biopsychosocial” image rejects notions of the givenness of a human listener-composer subject in favor of a de-subjectified symbiont contingently implicated in complex systems dynamics. This is also illustrated in relation to Keith Rowe’s free improvisation practices. The paper discusses how Batroun Concrète 2.1 - 2.9 leverages the notion of assemblage as compositional method; how materiality both informs and develops the composer’s biopsychosocial approach to post-acousmatic composition; and introduces key concepts relevant to issues at stake in the work: post-acousmatic, not-knowing listening stance, reflexive-reflective, interiority-exteriority, and reception-interpretation-action helix. By harnessing a specific assemblage of concepts, subpersonal and transpersonal processes, agentive objects, and acoustics found at the derelict site, the graphic score composed open-ended non-determinate structural couplings between elements that investigated the material specificities of the site.
www.sethayyaz.com
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Eroding Together: Mattering Processes of Sound
(2019)
author(s): Samuel Thulin
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
I probe the complexity of material entanglements in situated sound art through an examination of the production and presentation of a recent project on the remote archipelago of the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec, Canada. The work, Compositional Routes of the Magdalen Islands (Thulin 2016), investigates the archipelago through sound, directly informed by the material processes that shape the islands, both physically and socially. In particular the project engages processes of erosion at the meeting point of wind, land, and sea, following the shifting contours of the littoral zone as sandstone cliffs turn to wandering dune formations. Sound here operates not only as material, or the voicing of materials, but as a mattering process that offers an opportunity to consider how different forms of material break apart and fold together. Drawing especially on work from science and technology studies, geography, and sound studies, I argue for a situated understanding of how sound matters and use the particularities of erosion on the Îles-de-la-Madeline as a way of understanding these processes.