Journal of Sonic Studies
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 ,
Vincent Meelberg url:
http://sonicstudies.org/about
Recent Activities
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The Consideration of Personal Sound Space: Toward a Practical Perspective on Individualized Auditory Experience.
(2018)
author(s): Elen Fluegge
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This is an account of personal sound space, a way of describing the auditory environment of an individual that emphasizes their conscious participation in a dynamic social exchange within that space, which is meant as a theoretical groundwork for further empirical research. The concept draws on ideas from across cultural studies to articulate a form of individualized auditory experience latent in the discourse. The term is structured into sound space, personal space and personal sound, whose concepts are explored individually as well as integrated in the collective term. Sonic experience is framed as a dynamic spatial-social complex whose conceptualization involves culturally informed ideas of territory and authority. This is compounded by attitudes of property and agency reinforced by the proliferation of personal audio technologies.
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Music City Excesses: Phenomenological Thresholds and Nashville Noise Regulations
(2018)
author(s): Michael Butera
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this essay I will be exploring phenomenological connections between private and public interpretations of urban sound. First, I will briefly outline a theory of perceptual excess wherein the listener is unable to interpret sounds according to intentional auditory categories. I argue that listeners respond through various acoustic techniques that intentionally change the way spaces sound, reforming acoustic orders. I will explore this in the case of Nashville, Tennessee’s urban noise ordinances. Its constructed identity as ‘Music City’ requires strategic maintenance to ensure that certain sounds are given priority (institutionalize live music) while others are suppressed (pre-recorded music) or marginalized (busking). The specificity of these laws indicates a capitalist cultural nostalgia as well as a fundamental preference for perceptual stability for residents, tourists, and lawmakers alike. A common logic is drawn between the subject as a phenomenological individual and the subject as a listening/governing state. The ability to predict and control which sounds will be heard, to sustain a certain acoustic order, highlights the problem of the listener’s perceptual stability in the context of urban noise and silence.
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Breaching Sonic Barriers? Sound Studies as a Transdiscipline
(2018)
author(s): Vincent Meelberg
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
According to Bernie Krause snow creates a distinct acoustic environment, one that is as capricious in range as are the conditions under which snow occurs (Krause 2012, 47). Just as the acoustic characteristics of snow are heterogeneous and variable, so are its semantics and the psychoacoustic level on which its sounds can be described. When we woke up on the morning of December 7, 2012, we were not very happy with the view of an immaculately white urban landscape nor with its accompanying specific, dampened, snowy silence. On that date we, the editors of the Journal of Sonic Studies (JSS), were supposed to host some 25 Dutch sound experts in the center for contemporary art in Leiden, Scheltema, and snow would imply that some of them would not be able to make it to Leiden due to train cancellations.
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Sound Art: Klang als Medium der Kunst
(2018)
author(s): Jan Nieuwenhuis
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
On the 15th and 16th of December, 2012, the editors of the Journal of Sonic Studies visited the exhibition “Sound Art: Klang als medium der Kunst” in the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. During and afterwards, they discussed the exhibition and four of its sound installations. This resulted in the variety of perspectives published in this article. The article is presented as a space through which the listener/reader/viewer must navigate. You enter a digital space – or a small exhibition – in which each editor reflects on the exhibition as a whole: Vincent Meelberg discusses sound art from the perspective of interactivity; Sharon Stewart presents four different approaches towards the installations, yet at the same time creates her own para-exhibition as recording-performer pursuing the fleeting nature of sound; Marcel Cobussen reflects upon the omnipresence of sound and the importance of listening; Jan Nieuwenhuis deconstructs the Dutch word “tentoonstelling” (“exhibition” in English) in order to rethink the visual paradigm of the museum and allow sound into its space.
After you have listened and read your way through the “entrance hall”, four different sound-spaces remain to be discovered. You can open the door and enter the room by clicking on the images of the sound installations. There, we – the editors – present our perspectives on the installations. Firstly (or lastly, if you prefer) Roberto Pugliese’s Equilibrium is grappled with; then Bernard Leitner’s Pulsierende Stille is absorbed; subsequently you can settle down in the Klangdom; and lastly (or firstly) listen in on Anselm Venezian Nehls’ and Tarik Barri’s #tweetspace.
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Editorial: One Month in the Life of the JSS Editors
(2018)
author(s): Marcel Cobussen
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
All JSS issues up to now, perhaps with the exception of JSS1, have been special ones, dealing with a specific theme: listening, television sounds, sonic epistemologies. (The upcoming JSS6 will be devoted to sound design, by the way.) JSS5 is special in another way: seldom will an issue of a journal be filled completely by texts and A/V materials composed by the editors of that journal themselves. Editors typically provide an opportunity to others to present their work, their experiences, their thoughts, their research, their findings; this time, however, the JSS editors use their own journal as a platform to display some of their own reflections on sound studies and sound art.[1] Shameless self-promotion or healthy pragmatism? The most important reason is that we think that the two items presented in this issue – a report of an expert meeting on auditory culture and a handful of mini-essays inspired by a sound art exhibition – might interest our readers: the first because it features efforts to transgress scientific and academic barriers in and through sound studies, the second because it presents a new way to write around sound art.
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Editorial: Aiming for an Impossibility?
(2018)
author(s): Vincent Meelberg
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, theorizing about sound must be like running about interior design. It would be useless, a hopeless endeavor that would not lead to any insight into the phenomenon under analysis. Nevertheless, stubborn as we are, we are convinced that it is possible, and even necessary, to attempt to articulate, through language as well as through other means, sound and sonic encounters in all their diversities.