We Three, Kinged: Crowning the Aural on 9/11
(2018)
author(s): Isaac Vayo
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This study examines the present predominance of visuality in relation to narratives of 9/11, concluding that aurality, typically undervalued in such conversations, is a more accurate and effective representation of 9/11-as-event. Within the broader field of 9/11 aurality, three specific examples are subject to more lengthy analysis in terms of their original context and their presentation to audiences via popular media: the voices of pilot-hijackers Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, the impacts of those jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers, and George W. Bush’s 14 September 2001 speech delivered from atop the rubble at the World Trade Center site. 9/11 aurality, then, succeeds where the visual imagination fails, allowing its account of the event to persist generationally, its internal logic to exist rationally, and its chief interlocutor, Osama bin Laden, to continue the discourse verbally.
Modelling the Shopping Soundscape
(2018)
author(s): Björn Hellström
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article’s pivotal theme is: How to compose a site-specific sound-art installation for a commercial space in order to improve conditions, while taking perceptual, social, aesthetical, temporal and spatial criteria into account.
The interdisciplinary, art-based research approach is derived from the concept of acousmatics, i.e. the process of apprehending any sound, the source of which is invisible. Acousmatic perception concerns the everyday identification process; when lacking visual contact with the sound source, we automatically seek references, such as social (what produces the sound and what is my relation to it?), aesthetical, spatial and temporal (e.g. orientation and demarcation). The acousmatic concept identifies phenomena based on individually, culturally and spatially conditioned experiences.
Today, a shopping culture dominates urban space. Indoor malls expose us to all types of acousmatically perceived sounds: jingles, signals, music and Muzak from public loudspeakers, mobile devices, etc. In this respect, one could claim that the soundscape of the shopping culture embodies an acousmatic environment.
In 2009, the research and sound-art group Urban Sound Institute (USIT) created a permanent sound installation in a shopping mall (Gallerian) located in downtown Stockholm. This installation serves as a case study for the present paper. The artistic assignment involved the creation of a meeting place without material devices as well as the enhancement of the overall atmosphere. The research objective was to elucidate different qualities of the sound installation in regard to the acousmatics of the shopping mall, promoting discussions on the articulation of sound-space configurations in relation to time and site-specific context, issues on musical-architectural qualities as well as objective, subjective and inter-subjective interrelationships between the experience of the sound-art installation and the experience of the shopping mall soundscape. Other applied, interrelated concepts are metabolic environment and masking- and cutting effects.
Auditory and Technological Culture: the Fine-tuning of the Dancehall Sound System “Set”
(2018)
author(s): Julian Henriques
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper describes how sound engineers in Jamaica fine-tune the huge and powerful dancehall sound systems to achieve their best auditory performance. This provides an example of how cybernetic systems combine musical and technological processes. The phonographic apparatus of the set utilizes three basic material electromagnetic processes: (1) power; (2) control (Bateson 1987) and (3) transduction (Simondon 1992). The sound System engineers fine-tune with a technique of compensation, described in terms of two corporeal sensorimotor practices: (1) the kinetic motor process of manipulating the value of particular components, or substituting one for another and (2) the haptic sensory process of monitoring the auditory output of the set. Further, the engineers are engaged in (3) evaluating or skilled listening (Sterne 2003) for the particular sonic qualities such as “balance,” “weight” and “attack” that the fine-tuning aims to achieve. Engineers learn to evaluate, select and combine sounds in the sociocultural milieu of an apprenticeship – as elements of a communication system (Wilden 1972).
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 18th International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics & Cybernetics. 7 to 12th August, 2006, Baden-Baden, Germany.
A Sonic Paradigm of Urban Ambiances
(2018)
author(s): Jean-Paul Thibaud
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper intends to investigate urban ambiances through focusing on the world of sounds. Although the aesthetics of everyday life implies employing the whole human sensorium, making it difficult to artificially separate the information received from the individual senses from each other, I explore what can be learned about an ambiance when we just listen to it. In other words, how and under which conditions is it possible to develop a sonic paradigm of urban ambiances? The basic argument is to consider sound as a particularly efficient medium to investigate and develop an account of urban ambiances. Various ideas will be explored in order to answer this question, involving theoretical, epistemological and methodological arguments. Three main directions are accentuated: the first one relates to the tuning into an ambiance, the second relates to the unfolding of an ambiance, and the third relates to the situating within an ambiance.
On Listening Keynote Speech at the 2011 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in Corfu, Greece
(2018)
author(s): R. Murray Schafer
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This is a video recording of the keynote speech R. Murray Schafer gave at the 2011 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in Corfu, Greece. The recording is made by Kenya DuBois Williams.
SEVEN METAPHORS FOR (MUSIC) LISTENING: DRAMaTIC
(2018)
author(s): Joshua Banks Mailman
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay probes the nature of listening by refusing to pin it down to a single essence. The epistemological value of metaphor is explained in terms of the cognitive metaphor and embodied mind theories of Lakoff and Johnson as well as the philosophies of Rorty and Fiumara. Then the various natures of listening are explained via seven metaphors: (1) Digestion, (2) Recording, (3) Adaptation, (4) Meditation, (5) Transport, (6) Improvisation, and (7) Computation. As a positive example, this set of metaphors promotes recognition of the inherent plurality of listening by staking out distinct facets which cannot be reduced to one another. This irreducibility is made more vivid and conceptually manageable by associating each of these facets with more concrete activities that are literally irreducible, or indeed seemingly unrelated. Moreover, some of these metaphors suggest the complementary and sometimes interdependent nature of diverse aspects of listening.